The View From the Edge
by Whiggity
Summary: Halloween is a strange time of year. Carrying around a big truth can hurt your heart after a while, and a journey through the woods isn't something you come out the other side of without a few wounds. Four stories, eleven years, post-canon. Rated for growing up.
1. Year Two

1

Atop a small butte at the edge of Aberdale, in the exhale of October's last, unseasonably warm breath, sat a quiet truck, its uncanopied bed open to the sky, lined on the inside with wooly blankets and a foam camping pad. Upon it lay two bodies side-by-side, breathing deeply, their eyes on the stars above.

"You were right," Wirt said after a minute. "That was way better than going to the Halloween dance."

Sara rolled over onto her side to look at him and smile. "Yeah," she said, laying her hand on his chest, which was still a little bit sweaty. "I told you."

"I just want to make sure you're… You're happy?" he said, turning his head, eyes wide. "Like… you're good?"

"Me? 'Course. It was my idea, Wirt," she said, giving him a little bit of a look, but she really thought it was sweet. "Are _you_ happy?"

"Yeah," said Wirt, and he smiled finally. "Yeah, I am." She leaned in to kiss him and then sat up, making the vehicle rock backward ever so slightly with the characteristic squeak they'd gotten very familiar with for the last ten minutes. Wirt followed her cue and placed a hand on the wheelhouse as she went digging through the blankets for her shirt.

"We might have messed up your truck's alignment," he said to her, and she laughed as she wiggled back into her ribcage-printed black turtleneck.

"You're worried about that?" she said, and nudged him. "Worth it." The teenager at her elbow blushed, but he laughed too. She tossed him his jeans and laid back down with a thump while he wriggled to put them on.

She said, "It's beautiful," as he laid down next to her, extending his arm over her head and placing a hand on her far shoulder. The stars above shone like little pinpricks cut out of a black sheet held up over the day.

Wirt agreed. "It is beautiful."

_"And what are stars if not lanterns, hung on the boughs of the tree of the world, to light the path forward?"_ Sara intoned, and felt Wirt stiffen next to her.

"Saraa, you can't," he said despairingly, but she nuzzled into his side for a moment and then poked his ribs.

"Don't tell me I can't. I love your poetry," she said, and sat back up again. She slipped on her leggings and sneakers, crawled atop the wheelhouse, and then jumped down to the ground. Gravel crunched beneath her feet.

"You going somewhere?" Wirt asked, and she could hear him copying her actions as she approached the edge of the hill. The truck gave a creek and his shoes, too, hit the gravel.

Sara said, "Just enjoying the view," and leaned up against the bare tree at the drop-off of the butte. Long dry grass tickled her ankles as Wirt walked up next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. Their little hometown spread out several hundred feet below them, glowing brightly, a perfect Halloween-orange hue. You could see the bowling alley from here, and the high school, and the flashing lights on the hospital roof. Somewhere far away, they heard the happy screams of children. The hills on the eastern horizon cut hard black shapes against the purplish sky.

"Way better than going to the Halloween dance," Sara said aloud, agreeing with her own sentiment.

"Do you think we should drop by?" Wirt asked. "It's senior year. This is our last chance."

"I would totally agree with you if the after-party wasn't going to be so much better," Sara said, rolling her head in toward his shoulder. "That, I think we should drop by. It's where everyone's going to actually be, anyway."

"Mm," Wirt said, and by way of responding leaned in to place a peck in her thick black hair. He was tall enough that it landed right on the crown of her head.

"You sure we can't just stay up here tonight?" Sara asked, wrapping an arm around his waist and looking to the east. "I want to be here to see the sun rise."

Wirt smiled, but shook his head. "Nah. I have to go to Greg's dress rehearsal in the morning and Mom will notice if I'm not in the house."

"Oh yeah, you said something about that. What's he in?"

"Adventures of Huck Finn. It's just like the real book, but without all that downer racism stuff." Sara laughed. "Anyway, he's Tom Sawyer, which is kind of a big part, and he pretty much told me I'm coming, so…"

"Your brother is so cute that it kills me," Sara said, very sincerely.

"Yeahh, kills me too," said Wirt with the tone of one who has suffered long hard years, but Sara knew he didn't mean it. The brothers were close. Every time she went over for dinner, seven-year-old Greg had new stories to regale her with about the make-believe games Wirt used to play with him; it was sweet.

They stood together at the crest of the hill for a long time, taking in the little details of the town below. Cars moved slowly on every street as children's almost-invisible shapes dashed beneath the streetlights. Sara looked up at her boyfriend, clad in denim and cotton and a leather vest with a plastic star pinned on; "Hey, Cowboy," she said, and reached up to brush his hair from his face. "You forgot your hat."

"I don't have to wear my whole costume when there aren't other people around," Wirt said defensively.

"Well, you should get it, because it's –" she checked her watch "— ten oh-three, and there _are_ going to be other people around when we get to that after-party. So saddle up, pardner." Wirt gave her a half-smile. Sara pulled her arm away and began shuffling back toward the truck to bundle up the blankets, but Wirt stopped her when he asked, "Hey, Sara?"

She turned around. "Yeah?"

"You wouldn't mind if we… stopped by the cemetery first, would you?" He sounded kind of nervous.

Again? Sara didn't say so, but she was surprised. She would have thought he'd gotten it out of his system by now. "Yeah, I suppose so," she said, and Wirt looked visibly relieved – whether because she hadn't said no, or because she hadn't asked why, she wasn't sure. She jabbed a thumb at the car. "But help me put the love nest away first, huh?"

"Ma'am." Wirt tipped an invisible hat, jogged up toward her with a bounce in his step, gave her a kiss in passing, and continued toward the car. Sara crossed her arms and watched after him. He was a romantic fool even while he pretended to be a cynical old man. She got that, and she loved him for it. But she wouldn't ever get his thing with the cemetery.

* * *

This marked the third year in a row that involved some interaction between Wirt, Sara, and the Eternal Garden on Halloween night. The first, during their sophomore year of high school, had infamously ended with her friend Trisha running a half-mile in three minutes to find a phone and call an ambulance so that Wirt and his little brother didn't die from hypoxia on the ground next to the lake on the other side of the cemetery wall; that had been fun. Wirt seemed different afterward, too, as you might expect of someone who'd had a near-death experience. He got a little more confident. Easier to talk to. They'd started hanging out a lot more after that.

The following year, Jason Funderberker (the human, not the frog) had hosted a party at his parents' house, the big estate on Montresor Street, and Wirt and Sara had gone to an event as a 'thing' for the first time, sort of. She was a bloody nurse and he was a pirate who looked uncomfortable in his own beard; there'd been age-inappropriate beverages available at the wet bar, but neither of them were really into it. When the rest of their peers were too out of it to be interesting conversation anymore, she and Wirt had gone for a walk together, enjoying some of the last autumn colors they'd see before the snow rolled in. As they turned the corner they came face-to-face with the looming gates of the Eternal Garden before them, and Wirt had stopped clear in his tracks.

"You okay?" Sara asked.

Wirt didn't answer for a minute. "I'm fine," he finally said, but he'd had a really odd look on his face when he did. Sara felt like she got it; facing the place where you almost died is pretty heavy stuff. But he'd just looked so strange to her – not sad or scared, like you'd think, but wistful, like he was missing something, or wanted to say something but couldn't. Wirt had taken off his pirate hat almost reverently, and taken a step toward the gates, but then changed his mind and turned around.

"Wirt…" Sara said as he passed her by.

Wirt had looked up at her, and then a funny look crossed his face, and all of a sudden he took her by the shoulders and kissed her for the very first time, which she was fine with, even if his pirate beard tickled her, because she'd been pretty sure if she didn't initiate it soon it would never happen at all.

And now here they were a year a later, at the entrance to the bone garden once again. She hadn't been back since – she had little enough reason to see the place even on Halloween – but Greg said that he and Wirt went to visit sometimes, and in those exact words. When she asked Greg who they visited, he threw up his hands. "All the great friends of ours!" Which was adorable, but didn't make it any less weird. Sara didn't care what Wirt's actions looked like to anyone else; she worried about what they meant to Wirt. Why was he haunting the graveyard, and was he okay? But the last time she'd heard about him doing it had been months ago now, and she'd kind of thought his thing with it had passed. Clearly she'd been wrong.

She and Wirt approached the gates side-by-side, an odd duo of small glow-in-the-dark skeleton and freakishly tall cowboy. Unlike the last time she'd been here, Wirt didn't hesitate to enter, but walked in quite comfortably and looked around, as if browsing a bookstore. Somewhere to the south, she could see bobbing flashlight beams, and knew that some kids were probably doing as she'd done a few years past and telling less-than-spooky stories between the gravestones. She smiled a little. Wirt was meandering toward the far corner of the cemetery, where the oldest graves sat backed up against the wall. She raised the flashlight that she'd pulled from the glove compartment and clicked it on. "Aren't you forgetting something, Wirt?" she called, gesturing with it at his back, and he turned around.

"Thanks," he said as she caught up with him. He turned his gaze to the far cemetery wall and looked, suddenly, sad.

"Hey," she said, putting a hand on his elbow. "You gonna tell me what's up?"

He said, "Just thinking," which was clearly true, but it wasn't a real answer either. Sara frowned. Wirt started trudging forward, looking at the gravestones he passed in the dull glow from the streetlights outside the fence. Sara made her own easy way through the slabs, glancing at dates here and there out of curiosity to who had died most long ago. Wirt stopped in front of a particularly large stone and then didn't move again, not until Sara had made a full round of the corner on her own. She came up next to him and took his hand.

"What's this?" she asked. The gravestone announced the man and woman who were buried in the plot together – a Rose and Harold Miller – but beneath, it also listed what looked like full tens of other names. Vernon, George, Bethany, Walter, Beatrice, Mary, Harold Jr. – all of them had birthdays between twenty and forty years after those of Rose and Harold, but every single name on the slab shared the same year of death. Beneath it all was the epitaph, "Gone from the world, not from the heart".

"Is this a whole family?" Sara asked after a minute.

"Yeah," Wirt said. He sounded kind of choked up.

"Wow," she said. She ran her fingers gently along the engraving and then pulled back. "That's… terrible. It must have been a disease. Or a house fire." Wirt kind of tightened his jaw, and Sara had the feeling she maybe shouldn't have said anything.

"Greg found it," he said miserably. "He was really, uh… really proud of himself for being able to read the names." Sara didn't get it. Wirt looked positively heartbroken, but these people had died more than a hundred years ago.

"Are you related to them?" she asked.

Wirt shook his head and scratched his face, an action that looked like it might have been meant to conceal a whisk at his eyes. "No," he said. "No." And he slowly walked away again, leaving Sara by herself to hold the flashlight up to the old names of strangers. She took a deep breath.

"So you're really not going to tell me what's going on with you?" she asked, jogging to catch up with her boyfriend yet again. "I'm fine with being here, but it's making you act really weird, Wirt. Are you really okay?"

Wirt finally turned to look at her. "Sorry," he said, a little slumped over. "I've just got a lot in my head and it's kind of hard to talk about." His eyes were deeply sorrowful.

Sara thought about it. "That's too bad," she said, and gave him a hug. "I thought we were having a nice night earlier."

"Oh, we were!" Wirt insisted, throwing up his hands as if in surrender. "No, yeah, Sara, it was – it was wonderful. Really." She grinned a little at that. "This doesn't have anything to do with that. I promise." Wirt's face was lit all gold in the autumn night's light.

"It's got to do with when you pretty much drowned," she said. "I know."

"Yeah," he said. She saw him look back at the big tombstone, engraved with more names than she could count at a glance. "I guess it's, uh… hard not to feel a little sympathy for the dead now. Tonight." Sara supposed she could understand that.

They stood close by each other as a little gust of wind pushed a puff of leaves against their feet. "That's the only place I haven't gone back to yet," Wirt said, and Sara followed his gaze to the portion of the cemetery wall over which arched an enormous oak. She'd climbed it a few times. "I've been back since that night to see the rest, but the other side…" He shook his head.

"Will it make you feel better if you try?" Sara asked.

"I don't know," Wirt said. "Maybe."

"Well, come on, then," Sara urged, and placed her foot in the first low divot of the brick wall.

"Ahh, Sara, no, maybe we shouldn't…" Wirt tried to protest, but Sara was already on her way up. She hoisted herself past the first load-bearing branches and then shimmied out onto the top of the wall and sat down.

"Come on, Wirt!" she called, and she heard a defeated sigh down below. While she waited for him, she looked out to the landscape visible from her vantage point, but there wasn't that much landscape to be seen on a moonless night. Grassy train tracks ran along the outside edge of the wall at the top of a steep hillside, with a small lake and a copse of trees at the bottom. This was the edge of town, and beyond them the only things to see were low black mountains and the vast starry sky.

"Now, this is a pretty nice view too," she said as Wirt finally joined her on the top of the wall.

"Yeah," he said, kind of quietly, and Sara wondered whether she was doing him any good in asking him to be here. His eyes were on the still lake at the bottom of the hill. She bit her lip a little and decided to pat his shoulder.

"Hey," she said, smiling, trying to make it really clear she did want to help. "What's going through your weird Wirtful head?"

The kind of smile that she liked to see flicked across his face for a minute. "Heh," he said. "That's, uh…" He didn't finish the sentence, but faded away into apparently deep thought, eyes still on the shimmering water below. "Sara," he said after a minute. "What's the most important thing that ever happened to you?"

"Important like good?"

"Important like… significant. Something big."

She thought about it for a moment. "I dunno," she said. "Maybe when my parents got divorced." The other contenders were when her Granna died and when her mother made her quit ballet, but they didn't really compare in terms of long-reaching consequence. "What about you?"

Wirt didn't need time to think about his answer. "Falling into that lake," he said, pointing as if she could have missed it. "Nearly getting hit by the train, and falling into that lake." Sara smirked at him a little, and he caught her look. "What?"

"Wrong answer," she teased, and bumped him with her hip. "The right one was, 'The moment I met you.'" They laughed for a minute, and then Sara thought about what he'd said. "I don't know, Wirt. I can't tell you how to feel, and I know what happened to you was horrible. But how does that night compare to the permanent stuff? Like when Greg was born? Or when your dad…" She trailed off and stopped, and then looked away. Wirt wasn't looking at her either.

She took a minute before continuing, softly, "…Unless, you know, what happened a couple years ago on Halloween_ is_ still having a really big effect on you. In which case I hope you'll talk to me about it." If that wasn't a clear enough invitation, she didn't know what was.

"I, uh, saw a lot of things, that night," Wirt said, scratching his head. "While I was in the water."

This was new information to Sara, but it wasn't too strange to hear. "Yeah, it happens." she said. "Your brain almost shut down from lack of oxygen."

"Heh. Yeah, it did." His tone was light, but she could see his face a little in the darkness, and he looked worried. "It was just… It was really _grand,_ you know? There were whole towns and rivers and a forest that was autumn forever. And people! Just, tons of people. I made friends." Wirt stopped and looked up at her, clearly trying to gauge her reaction.

"That's really cool," Sara said. "I wish I could have seen this stuff."

"You believe me?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, raising an eyebrow. "Why would you lie about it?"

He didn't answer, but she could see him smile. "It was so _strange,"_ he said, and he picked at the moss atop the wall with the hand closer to her. "And then ever since I woke up, it seems like everything else has been strange too. I mean, look at me. I have friends. My stepdad and I went fishing last weekend and I didn't totally hate it. And, you know, you and me…" She liked to hear that, and took his hand. "I even got my acceptance letter to audition for the conservatory yesterday."

Sara said, "You did? That's great, Wirt!" He squeezed her hand back. She didn't say any of the things they were both thinking, about how far away the conservatory was from the state school where she had been offered a chemistry scholarship. This wasn't the time for that.

"Thanks," he said. "Everything's kind of great. And sometimes it makes me wonder if, I don't know, I never really made it out of that lake. Maybe I'm making all of this up in my head while I drown."

"Hey now," she said. "You're fine, Wirt. You're right here, with me."

He said, "Yeah. I think I know that." Sara pondered this. She couldn't very well succeed in reassuring him she wasn't a figment of his imagination, in a world where an objective view of reality is impossible from any standpoint. So she did the next best thing, and leaned in to kiss him instead.

"And you know what else?" Wirt continued when they were done, pointing down at the train tracks ten feet below their dangling shoes. "That thing I said about getting hit by the train? That's impossible, because these tracks haven't been connected to any railway for forty years. But it happened anyway." He threw up his hands. "I just don't know anymore, Sara."

Sara said, "Wow," squinting at the overgrown tracks. "That's…" And now it was her turn to pause uncertainly, because she thought for sure that she'd heard the whistle of a train in the distance, that Halloween two years ago, as she climbed the tree to follow Wirt and Greg across the wall and was confronted with the sight of them plunging into the water. She'd never really thought about it before. "That's really weird, Wirt."

"Don't I know it," he said, hunching over his lap with his arms crossed. Starlight glinted off his sheriff's badge. "There's a point where the weird gets so big you can't tell where it ends anymore."

Sara closed her eyes as the wind stirred, pushing her hair across her face and serenading them both with the rattle of grass and the smell of sweet earth. She tried to put herself in the place that Wirt talked about, in an endless autumn forest with sunlight pouring down through the branches. It was beautiful, and she smiled.

"I can kinda imagine it," she said. "Your fall forest. I love it already."

"Yeah?" Wirt asked, and scooted toward her a little. He put his hand back over hers and she could hear him lean back, closing his eyes as well. "And can you imagine the schoolhouse by the pond?"

A 'schoolhouse' was only ever old-fashioned, so what Sara thought of was apples by the chalkboard, and wooden desks neatly in a row, bleached by the sun through dusty windows. "Yeah."

"And the mill by the river?"

Easily. A modest grist mill churned evening waters slowly as bluebirds nestled in the nook of the chimney. "Mm-hmm."

"And the frog steamboat?"

"Pfft. Wirt," she laughed.

He waved her down, though. "No, really! Imagine it. A great big red-and-white steamboat, peddling slowly through the marshes, and every one of the passengers is a singing frog dressed to the nines."

"Wow. Yeah, I can imagine that." She opened her eyes finally, and they sparkled in the starlight. "I couldn't ever come up with most of this stuff, Wirt." She leaned into his arm and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. "I really wish I could have seen all these things."

"Well, it wasn't all nice," he said.

"I don't care," she said. "I'd like to be there with you." In her mind, they were two dark happy shapes almost disappeared against the splendid shadows of fall, walking together on a path made for pilgrims.

And somewhere far away, there came the small, but definite sound of a steam engine's whistle.

They jumped at the same time and stared down the tracks for a full minute, half expecting a black train to arrive beneath their feet, but it never did. Wirt turned to look at her finally. "Uh… Man, it's getting late," he said with a nervous laugh. "That… after-party, huh?"

"Oh." Sara checked her watch. "Yeah. I guess we should go to that."

"Yeah," Wirt agreed. "Senior year's our last chance." And they sat a little awkwardly for a minute before Wirt gave her a grin and they started to descend the tree, one after the other.

At the bottom, everything was silent. The kids who'd been popping around the graveyard before seemed to have left. Sara turned her head as they walked away and cast her eyes back again over the Garden's wall.

"I'd like to hear more about it," she said to Wirt, and he looked down at her. "Didn't you say something about people, too?"

"Oh man," he said, and smiled, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder while they walked side-by-side. "Yeah. Some of them are right over there." He was pointing toward the old plots by the wall.

Sara gave him a look. "Come on, Wirt."

"No, really! Let me tell you, Sara, you should have been there. You would have loved Beatrice."

* * *

Before the dress rehearsal at the auditorium the following morning, while Wirt was away looking for a cup of coffee, Greg bounced up to Sara in the front row of seats and placed a drawing in her lap.

"Hey Greg," she said. He was dressed in overalls and a straw hat, with Jason Funderburker strapped to his back like an avocado baby. "What's this?"

"I drew you a picture!" Greg said proudly. It was a crude rendering of a sailboat, with what looked like himself and Wirt aboard among many green people in nice dresses. The brothers were only recognizable for their headwear distinctive to two Halloweens ago. "It's a frog boat. I kinda forget, but me and Wirt visited waay back-a-day." He hoisted himself up between the armrests of the seat next to hers and swung his feet back and forth.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"Yeah! It was a nice day, and Jason Funderburker shared his beautiful tenor." The frog croaked. Greg dropped to the ground as the director made a call to begin rounding up children backstage. "You should have come, Sara! Jason says to invite you for the next time. Anyway, I gots-to-go!" And he scampered off, leaving Sara holding the paper by herself.

Wirt came back as the lights were beginning to go down, and offered her a Styrofoam coffee cup. "What's that?" he asked as she folded up the paper and tucked it into her bomber jacket.

"Present from Greg," she said. They quieted down as the curtains began to draw open on a late summer pastoral scene and didn't speak again for a long time. Sara never stopped smiling even once.

* * *

**I love to hear feedback, so if you have any thoughts, I hope you'll take the time to comment. :)**


	2. Year Four

2

_He was back in the forest. Leaves crunched beneath his feet, and high above his head, starlings flittered between thick oak branches soaked in sunlight. The old grist mill was looming up ahead, indolently churning the swollen waters of late afternoon. The front door opened, and from its gloom stepped Beatrice as he'd seen her only once after he clipped her wings, a tall, glum-faced redhead._

_"Come on, Greg!" he called over his shoulder. "Come on, we're almost there!" He raised a hand to wave to Beatrice as he ran up the road. She looked about for the commotion, but when her eyes landed on him her expression turned to one of confusion and worry._

_"Wirt?" she asked as he slowed to a stop before her. She sounded scared. "What are you doing here?"_

_He was about to respond to her when he looked around and realized that Greg wasn't with him. He spun in a circle, but saw him nowhere. A thrill passed through him as he realized that if he was in the Unknown, he must be dead. He had died, and left Greg behind._

_She put out a hand toward him. "Beatrice –" he started to say, but all of a sudden found himself being pulled from her by the heady waters of the river, flooding across the ground to bear him away. He tumbled through the cold water and reached out for air but couldn't find it. Looming rocks swept by, threatening to break his body, and deeper he was pulled into the dark as his lungs burned and burned –_

And Wirt woke up with a gasp.

He sat up immediately at his desk, nearly knocking his history of music textbook to the floor as he gripped the lip and panted. His lamp was pushed askew and shone over the back wall of the dorm, lighting upon his roommate's dresser and lending an incandescent glow to the many marching band trophies and pennant flags atop it. Wirt took a minute to calm down; his heart was pumping so hard that he could feel his hands pulse with it. He shook his head and finally sat back in his chair, squeezing his eyes shut and slapping himself gently on the face.

Everything was alright. It was just a dream. His felt as though there was still water clinging to his skin, but shook off the sensation as well as he could. This sort of thing was just par for the course, this time of the year.

The sun had finished setting at some point while he slept, and through the window now drifted the faint sounds of drunken laughter. The clock on the wall said that it was 10:03; his roommate, Reggie, wasn't back yet, and likely wouldn't be for hours, if at all.

"You sure you don't want to come?" he'd asked Wirt earlier in the evening while he fitted his false teeth in the bathroom as the last touch to his werewolf costume. "It'll be fun, man. I'll introduth you to thome girlth."

"I appreciate the offer, Reggie," Wirt had said, still sitting at his desk, uncostumed, "but I have a test tomorrow morning and I've really got to study."

"Thuit yourthelf," the big sousaphonist had said, grinning down at him through the brown hair glued to his face. "'But ith only one night, man. Live a little."

The truth was, Wirt just hadn't been feeling the spirit this year. He'd never been that much for holidays, and ever since a certain Halloween four years back, this one's glimmer in particular had faded for him even more. When he was still at home he'd participated because that just was what you did as a kid, and because Sara loved it so much. Last year, his first at school, he'd even put in the effort to buy fangs and dye corn syrup red so that he could be a vampire for the night and try to have some fun, but it didn't really work. He'd ended up sitting on the stained couch in Boltzmann Hall's damp UV-lit basement, talking to no one, drinking weakly-spiked punch while the crowd laughed and sung along to the Monster Mash slammed out on the untuned marimba on the other side of the room. He knew very well that his isolation was his own fault – it always had been – people tried so hard to make him feel welcome – but it just wasn't something he could fake anymore. Not on Halloween.

This year, Wirt hadn't even considered going out. He felt distracted. Tired. So he'd lied about a test to the people who asked him, and made plans instead to – to what? To fall asleep on his desk, apparently. Typical.

He pushed his chair out and stood up, bending the cricks out of his neck. He put his hands on the windowsill and leaned out into the cool night air, hoping it would burn some of the tiredness out of his eyes. Halloween-time always came with dreams like this one, as well as a pervading sense of sad, clinging nostalgia. This was, in fact, the third dream of the sort he'd had this week, but the first he'd had about Beatrice in months. He wasn't sure why he'd placed her at the mill, because to his knowledge she'd never even known about it, let alone been there, but that was just one weirdness of many, and he wouldn't let it bother him too much.

What _did_ bother him was the speed with which the pictures had already faded. He tried to think, but the vision of Beatrice's shocked face from the end of the dream had blurred; for a minute he'd been able to remember what she looked like as a human, but like a lot of things from then, the real details had faded long ago. There was a sorrow in that fact which was hard to express. And it was something he couldn't talk to anyone else about.

Well, there was one person.

What he wanted, he realized, was for Sara to be here. They had a kind of understanding: she listened and responded to the things he had to say about the night he and Greg fell into the water as if he were bouncing short fiction ideas off of her, and he never tried to tell her otherwise. The conversations always made her smile, but she never fully said what she thought of it all, and he appreciated that. She was a hundred and thirty miles away from him right now, though, probably operating the lights or fog machine for her much larger school's campus Halloween party, dressed in a real costume, hanging out with other friends and having a good time, and he shouldn't bring her night down by calling just to tell her about a dream. And it was just a dream.

Wirt wandered from the window to the kitchenette, but didn't really feel hungry. His feet were heavy, but his hands felt restless, so on an impulse, he peeked his head out the front door and looked both ways to check for foot traffic. No one was around, so after a moment's hesitation he started slinking down the half-lit hall in his socks. Paper pumpkins smiled widely at him from the walls, but he'd had trouble for the last few years seeing them as anything other than masks. The floor phone was next to the east window, and Wirt picked up the receiver and dialed in the number for Sara's school with practiced roteness.

It picked up after three rings. "West State University Switchboard," intoned the operator, "how may I direct your call?"

"Hi," he said. "Could you please put me through to Berkshire Court, fourth floor?" He rubbed his head as they transferred him, feeling a little nervous, causeless though it was. He'd yet to hear back from Sara that she'd received his most recent cassette in the mail, and they hadn't seen each other since late July, but he_ always_ talked to her about this stuff when it came up. The phone started to ring. It was true that it was just a dream, and he didn't want to ruin Sara's good night if she had other things going on… But on the off-chance that she didn't, he might as well call.

It was picked up very quickly. "Hello?" a girl's voice asked.

"Hi," he said. "I'm, uh, trying to get through to Sara. She's not around…?"

"Uh," said the voice distractedly, and it moved away from the phone. "Guys, is Sara around? Georgia? _Listen_ to me, Georgia, is Sara here? Well, then where is she? …Okay, fine." The voice drew back up to the receiver, sounding grumpier than before. "I don't know where she is. _ Somebody _drank half a bottle of peppermint schnapps on Halloween, _Halloween_ –_ get away from the button, Georgia!_ – and isn't being very helpful."

"Oh, well, that's alright," Wirt said, twirling the cord distractedly. "If you see her tonight, could you tell her Wirt called? I mean, unless it's really late, then don't bother her, because it's not like it's really that big a deal and I don't want her to go out of her way –"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll tell her," said the other voice, which was starting to become garbled by distance again. "Oh, wait, Wirt, you said? I know that name." There was the sound of whispering. "Are you the guy who makes those clarinet recordings she listens to in her room all the time?"

Wirt was starting to turn red. "I –"

"You're pretty good, man!"

"Oh. Thanks."

"Okay, okay, crap, I'm getting off the phone now, she's puking – I'll tell her if I see her, dude." And the line clicked and went dead. Wirt sat bemused and disappointed for a minute. He couldn't say he was surprised she wasn't slinking around her room like he was tonight, but the affirmation of it made him feel like even more of a failure than before.

He sat down in the armchair by the window, phone still in hand, not quite sure what to do next. The moon this year was halfway to full, a familiar crucible shape in the sky that always made him anxious. As if he needed another thing to keep his mind even further from the real world right now. For a few minutes he was quiet, thinking to himself; then he leaned in toward the dialpad again. This time he rang home.

An automated operator took the line. _"You are about to place a long-distance collect call. Please record your name for the recipient at the tone."_

He braced himself for a second waiting for the beep, and when it came, said, "Momit'sWirtcallmeback," as quickly as he could. The recording concluded and he was instructed to stay on the line. He waited for the call to be rejected, and then placed the handset back in its cradle, where it immediately began to ring again. He picked it back up.

The voice on the other end couldn't have sounded more thrilled. _"Honey!"_

"Hey, Mom," he said, kicking back in the chair, eyes still on the sky. "How are you? Yeah, I'm doing fine. Happy Halloween to you too." He uncurled the cord slowly from his fingers, and then started to do it up again. "No, I'm not partying. I never party. I'm studying for a test. …I don't know how she is. I haven't talked to her in a while." He took a minute to be quiet as she spoke. "Of course I still care, but we're not –" He pulled the handset away from his ear and rubbed his temples gently as his mother took the opportunity to share with him, not for the first time, her opinion on what a mistake his and Sara's breakup had been. He shouldn't have given her that opening.

"Yeah, Mom, I know you think that, but I told you. It's over. We're still friends. You talk to Sara's mom all the time, you should know how she's…" He stopped again and waited for his mother to finish. "…Yeah, okay, Mom, alright. Anyway, I was hoping I could talk to Greg? I know it's a little late, but if he's still up…"

His mother, however, assured him that Greg wouldn't go to bed so early on Halloween. "He's got the sugar-shakes," she said cheerfully as something audibly broke in the background. "I'll get him for you." There was a lot of shuffling on the other end of the phone for a moment, and a muffled voice, and then she came back on to say, "Here he is! Also, your father says hi."

"Okay, yeah. Say hi to Phil for me too." And then there was a second longer before the phone shifted again.

"Wirt!" Greg cried so loudly that the older boy had to pull the set a few inches from his ear. "Happy Halloween!"

"Hey, Greg," Wirt said. "Happy Halloween to you too."

"Oh man, I'm so glad you called!" He heard rustling. "We went out late and I got like seventeen peanut smackers from Mrs. Lettersby because she wanted to empty the bowl. I was gonna save them for you when you come home for Thanksgiving –"

"You don't need to do that, Greg."

"Yeah, but I want to. They're your favorite." There was a croak from somewhere on the other end. "Jason Funderburker says hi!"

"Hi, Jason Funderburker," Wirt said dutifully. He croaked again, and Greg laughed.

"Oh, that frog. What's Halloween like at college, Wirt?"

"Hmm," he said, peering down onto the grounds through the window. Someone looked like they were throwing up at the base of a tree. He'd heard a joke, once, about music school being stuffy, but certainly not dry. "Not very exciting."

"I don't believe you. I think you're just not doing fun things."

"Ouch. Very sharp, Greg. I think you're starting to catch on to me."

"You're not that hard to figure out." Another croak sounded. "Jason Funderburker says he had you figured out from the first moment he saw you!"

"Yeah, I'm sure," Wirt said, swiveling in the chair to put his legs over the arm. A thought occurred to him, and he said, "That was four years ago."

"Huh?"

"Uh… We found Jason Funderburker four years ago tonight, Greg."

"Oh, wow!"

"Yeah." It actually was pretty weird to think about. "Guess that makes it kind of like his birthday, huh?"

"Wooooah!" Greg's voice diminished for a moment. "Get over here, you great green guy! _Hnnnm…"_ There was a muffled ribbit, and he picked the phone back up. "I gave him a hug."

"Well, it's the least you could do on his birthday." Wirt watched a cloud drift lazily across the face of the half-moon with a little bit of a smile on his face, but a strange sinking feeling in his belly. He and Greg never really talked about that night, not anymore. Once upon a time he'd engaged with his brother in little plays about the things they'd seen under the water, but he hadn't been able to stomach it for years now. As time deepened the gulf between now and then, his self-assurance seemed more prone to betray him.

"Greg?" he asked after a minute.

Greg stopped crinkling what sounded like candy wrappers. "Yeah?"

"How much do you remember about the night we found your frog?"

_"Our_ frog," Greg corrected him. "I remember stuff."

"How much?"

"Lots! You know…" He could almost hear Greg shrug over the phone. "The trees. The bluebird."

"Beatrice."

"Yeah! Beatrice. And… the witch? And the dog?" He paused. "I mean, I remember _about_ them, it's just the pictures are kinda fuzzy."

"Mm." He wasn't sure what he'd expected to hear. Greg had been just five then; the only memories Wirt still had from being that young were things to do with his dad, and even those were only impressions, nothing clear. No one could be expected to remember everything at that age, no matter how big.

But Wirt didn't like the idea of being the last person in the world left to forget it all, either.

When he was fifteen, he never would have thought that having a secret could weigh so heavy on a person, as if just the act of keeping it quiet was a little lead ball in your pocket all the time. Four years on, that ball had grown heavier to bear, not lighter, and it had been even more difficult to ignore lately. Some nights, dreaming of it was like going back all over again, and he didn't know why he always felt so disappointed when he woke to find it wasn't true. Even the nightmares, the ones where he was bound to the ground with leaves slowly growing up around his throat, made him feel vindicated, somehow, and sadder for losing them in the morning; in dreams' brief moment, fantasy had the same clarity as reality, and he felt like he wasn't crazy.

Always at the change in season, it felt like with one wrong turn, he might find himself suddenly stepping over roots and moss and crumbled leaves instead of cigarette butts and plastic bags, as the buildings around him turned to thatch and stone and the lamps to warped oak trees. Sometimes he anticipated it. Sometimes that worried him. When his fellow woodwinds got hazy-late-night-philosophical in the disused sixth-floor utility closet, he always let them go at it, but never spoke himself, because in matters of life and death he simply didn't know what to believe anymore. And he couldn't tell anyone about that. No one but Sara, who couldn't ever know the whole story, and Greg, who'd started to forget it. Whenever he thought about it too much, he was overwhelmed with the twin sensations of isolation and doubt, and so for a long time now, he'd stopped thinking about it at all.

That was probably what made it so hard when the memories were foisted on him from time to time.

"Wirt?" Greg said after a while.

"Yeah?" he asked. His eyes were idle on the sky outside the window, thinking of things that he would never see again.

"Are you okay?"

Wirt didn't answer for a minute. "Yeah. Why do you ask?"

Greg shifted. "Because it's pretty weird to call someone and then not say anything."

"Oh. Right." Now it was his turn to shift in the chair, putting his chin against the headrest so that he faced the window. "Sorry, Greg. I didn't mean to take up your Halloween. I should probably go."

"Hey!" He heard scrambling on the other end, and then a closing door. "Don't go, Wirt. You can talk. I'm alone."

"Did you just go into your room?"

"Yeah. Dad bought a cordless phone."

"Wow. That's pretty fancy."

"Yeah! He gets mad at me for leaving it in the backyard. Now –" there was a squeak of bedsprings "— tell me what's on your mind, brother!"

Wirt couldn't help smiling at that, but he had the feeling that his thoughts were not something he should be burdening a nine-year-old with. "It's nothing, Greg," he lied. "Just thinking about how weird our lives are."

"They are pretty weird." Jason Funderburker croaked. "I don't know anyone else who has a frog. And the bassoon is a weird instrument to go to school for. Also we scared away a demon once, and lived in the woods for a couple months, and went to an animal school. That's weird."

"You remember all that?"

"Yeah. Most of it. I mean, you know." There was fidgeting on the other end of the line. "Like I said, I remember that it happened more than I remember seeing it."

"Does that…" Wirt stopped himself for a second. "Does that make it feel any less real?"

"Huh? No." Greg's tone sounded amused that he would even say something so silly. "Not remembering a lot is still remembering. I only got one brain, and I gotta trust it. _Tok-tok."_ He made a sound to mimic knocking himself on the head. "Plus, you remember it too! And I trust you." Wirt smiled a smile that he was glad no one could see, because it probably looked pained. "But you know something? Sometimes when I dream, I can remember all of it, and I think I went back for the night."

That line seared in Wirt's chest, but he didn't say anything. "That's neat."

"Yeah. But I don't think you can just go back, Wirt." Wirt was in agreement with that; he wasn't sure Greg fully remembered what bad shape they'd been in when they came out of the water, but there's no easy way to tell a small child that he almost died. "I visited the lake and walked around in it, but I didn't find anything."

"Did you expect to?"

"Not really," he said sadly. "I thought I'd try." There was a soft _fwoomp_ sound; Greg seemed to have flopped over into his pillows.

Wirt asked, "Do you wish we could go back?"

Greg didn't answer for a minute. "…Sometimes. Just 'cause I want to remember." The admission was painfully familiar. He heard him pull the blankets up; Greg always tucked them in around his ears, and they ruffled loudly in the receiver. "There were so many neat people, and things," Greg yawned into the phone. "Sometimes it was scary, but you were the hero. I'm still gladder it happened and I can't go back, than I would be if it never happened at all."

Wirt looked up at the starry purple sky through the window, the same view he'd seen from between the Edelwood trees all those years ago. Someday the memory itself might fade, but the feeling of it would always remain.

"You know, you're right," he said after a minute. "I think I am too."

They talked for a little longer, some about the Unknown, but then about school and neighbors and Greg's junior acting troupe, with the younger brother growing steadily sleepier on his end of the phone. When the campus belltower tolled eleven, Wirt finally told him he should go to bed. Phil was going to be angry about the calling charge as it was.

"Yeah," Greg said sleepily with the receiver mashed up against his face, but then he perked up. "Oh, by the way, Wirt, Sara told me to tell you she finally got your cassette with the, um… flight of the conchords."

"What?" Wirt sat up. "The solo de concours? When did she tell you that?"

"Last week."

"You talked to Sara last week?"

"Yeah, at the park. She said she was visiting town 'cause it was her sister's birthday. That's the 22nd." He yawned widely. "I remembered for you 'cause you're gonna have to know this stuff for when you get married."

Wirt smiled at that, then sobered up, then let himself smile again. "Sure, Greg," he said. "Sure I will."

"Yeah," Greg said, beginning to mumble again.

There was a sound on the other end of the line, and he heard a door creak open. "Gregory?" was said at a distance. "Oh my goodness, are you still on the phone? Did you brush your teeth? They're going to rot right out of your face…"

"Goodnight, Greg," Wirt said as their mother's voice drew closer.

"G'night, Wirt," Greg mumbled in return, and finally, he hung up the phone.

Wirt laid the receiver in its cradle and leaned back in the arm chair, casting his eyes up to watch the very last sliver of the moon slip past the top of the window, where he could no longer see it. He felt kind of strange. He closed his eyes and thought about his dream again, about the mill in the sunshine. He couldn't get a good picture of it any longer, but he felt better. It wasn't bothering him as much as it had before.

He was just starting to stand up to stretch his legs when the phone rang again.

"Hello?" he answered, worried that he might have been preventing an incoming call for the last hour, but the voice that answered on the other end was welcomingly familiar.

"Wirt?" he heard. "Is that you?"

"Sara!" he said, scratching his head. "Hi!"

"Hey! I'm really sorry I missed you when you called earlier. I was out."

"It's okay," he said. "Probably a really big Halloween party at West U, huh?"

"That's what they said," she said. "I wouldn't know. I was watching a movie with Jacinda downstairs."

"Oh," Wirt said. And all of a sudden he felt like a little less of a loser.

Sara said, "Hey, is everything alright? Kaylee gave me your message and said you sounded kind of worried. I mean…" She paused. "I know it's Halloween and all. And what that means."

But Wirt had his eyes on the sky outside, dark and clear. With the moon gone now, the stars seemed much more bright. "Thanks, Sara," he said finally. "But I think I'm actually okay." He looked down at his stocking feet and started suddenly running ideas through his head. He had a black vest from his rehearsal getup in the closet, and a capgun and holster from his one-time cowboy costume stowed somewhere under the bed. It was not yet too late. With some emergency modifications, he wouldn't make a half-bad Han Solo.

"In fact," he said finally, "I just wanted to say happy Halloween. I think I'm going to go to a party."


	3. Year Seven

3

In the evening of the last day in the tenth month, Beatrice looked up from the stove to see a bluebird perched on the kitchen windowsill.

_"Fwee,"_ it chirped at her, looking like it knew something she did not. She said nothing, but laid down the cooking ladle and crossed her arms. While dinner boiled on the stove, she stared that bluebird down, until it finally hopped, turned, and flew away. Tension left her shoulders as the little blur of it disappeared into the twilight trees.

"Beatrice?" her mother asked from the other side of the room, halfway to her elbows in corn flour. "Everything alright over there?"

"Yes, Mom," she said, and took up the ladle again, but she couldn't help looking back at the windowsill while she spooned stew out for the family. Bluebirds, as she'd learned long ago, brought only misery and shadows to a person's door, but they also tended to avoid her. Maybe they had all learned their lesson about being within a rock's throw of her person, or maybe they shunned her on purpose to show that they shared no sorority even after her ordeal years back. Either way, to see one so close, so late in the day, so far into fall, seemed like a bad omen.

It seemed like there were bad omens everywhere, lately.

In the evening's early darkness, rain began to fall hard and fast. As the family tucked into supper, Beatrice struggled with her lack of appetite. She'd been fighting a peculiar melancholy of late, which was far from unusual for her, though her poor moods normally concentrated on palpable matters of inconvenience and woe, not this fugue of abstract worry. She looked about the table; her brothers tucked greedily into their stew, and her sisters broke cornbread with their backs to the fire. It was the same scene as every night, every person in their place.

Her stomach lurched, and she put a hand against her throat.

"How's my Broody Bee?" her mother asked from across the table, sweet-voiced, but giving her the fish eye.

"I'm –" She paused and looked away. "I'm not really feeling well," she said finally. "I think I might go lie down."

"You sure, Bluebird?" her father asked, mopping up his stew with a handful of soft bread. "You haven't touched your food."

Beatrice would have liked very much to instate a policy of refusing to respond to anyone who addressed her that way, but her family had unfortunately earned the right to give her grief about it, as she'd been reminded more than her share of times. "I'm fine," she said, and made to stand up from the table. "I just want to rest." Her brother Walter didn't hesitate to grab her stew and begin shoveling it into his mouth. "Greedy," she muttered under her breath as she pushed her chair in, but nobody paid her any mind.

"Alright, dear. Would you like me to bring up some broth later?" her mother asked.

"No thank you, Mom." She wasn't as careful as she should have been to keep her tone even and appropriately grateful, but she hadn't enough energy to try harder. Nobody said anything more to her, so she left the table for upstairs without further explanation. In the dark bedroom that she shared with her sisters, Beatrice stopped by the window as a low peal of thunder rattled the floor. Her stomach growled, but she really did feel too unwell to eat.

She knelt down in front of the bedroom window to watch the rain. Thunder clapped again, and Bruno, who had been startled awake by the noise from his spot at the foot of the bed, padded over to beg for attention. She put her chin in one hand, dedicated the other to rubbing the dog behind the ears, and stared out into the storm intensely, as though it could give her answers. She would have given anything to pull herself out of this strange funk; in contrast to her normal, voluntary moodiness, she had no control over it, and that bothered her.

The world seemed flat and useless lately – and repetitive. She bit her lip as she thought of her family again, all together at the dining table. Laughter, talk, fire to their backs. At its bones, the scene never really changed, and in fact, she'd been starting to realize recently that nothing in her life had changed at all in a very long time. The sun shone, of course, and the snow fell, and the mill churned, each and every year much the same in very normal ways – but she also couldn't, for instance, recall a night in living memory that the moon hadn't sat half-turned and still in the sky, ready to bloom but never doing so. In a few weeks she would be turning seventeen, just like she did every year, but this time, she approached the date with dread, because despite this being the way things had been for as long as she could remember, she grappled with the phantom feeling that it was nonetheless _wrong._

No one else seemed very concerned about the same things she did. "Mom," she'd asked once, as she and her mother sat stitching by the fire, "have we always just been here?"

"Hmm?" her mother asked, hardly looking up from her needlepoint. "Of course we have, dear. That's a very strange question." But Beatrice wasn't so sure. Her life in the Unknown was not something she could recall any clear beginning to, though she knew beyond a doubt that all things are supposed to have beginnings. Some nights she was kept up by thoughts of a childhood which she felt must have happened a very long time ago, and very far away, but the recollections always came with the remembered sounds of sobbing and the smell of smoke. Sometimes she felt like there was an obvious answer, for why there was such a gulf that separated her past from the ever-ongoing Now, and for why she hadn't grown older in more years than she'd even been alive, but it was not one that made her comfortable in considering. As if he could read her mind, Bruno nuzzled his nose into the palm of her hand.

She'd never found anything wrong with any of this, she thought to herself, before running into those tiny trails of chaos that had called themselves Greg and Wirt. They'd seemed incapable of _not_ causing permanent and profound disturbances in each and every thing they touched. She smirked at the rain as she thought of it, and pressed her forehead against the lumpy glass, but felt pained on the inside. She really, really didn't like to think about those kids, although unusually for her, it wasn't anything against them. It just hurt. Always in autumntime, she found herself lingering by the window more than usual, ostensibly to watch the colors change with the season, but in the back of her mind she wondered if it was finally going to be the day that she'd see a boy in a cloak and a red cone hat walking up the path to her door, with a teapot-topped child following close behind. Her mother would invite them in for tea, and Greg would talk the pants off all of them, and she Wirt would bicker like they used to and walk off eventually into the fall to see what waited out there for them, just as they once had, only this time, there wouldn't be any secrets between them, and he wouldn't have to leave in the end.

She never would have thought she'd be put in the position of missing her time under the curse, but at least it had helped her see her share of adventure, and madness, and change. It had changed her. She didn't like other people to notice it, but she just couldn't hate the world like she used to, even if it did still confuse her, and hurt her, and take away from her the only friends she'd ever really had.

Beatrice took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She was hungry, and ill, and generally poorly-equipped to be having deep thoughts, so she stood up finally and changed into her nightgown in the dark. Bruno laid loyally by the side of the bed as she crawled in, and she lowered a hand to dangle by his ear as she snuggled down into her pillow.

She thought it would take a long time to fall asleep with the sound of the rain pounding against the window, but she slipped away almost immediately into the soft darkness, and confusing and comforting dreams.

* * *

Only a few hours later, something startled her awake. Beatrice sat up stark-straight in bed. Her sisters had all come to join her since she'd gone to sleep, and Beth, who had been curled up in the small of her back, murmured and rolled over toward Mary instead. The mantle clock on the other side of the room sat in a beam of light, and said it was just three minutes past ten o' clock. Not so late, after all.

For a second, she wasn't sure what had woken her, but then it came again, drifting over from the window. She could see Bruno's thin shape in silhouette against it, growling lightly as he stared outside. Beatrice crawled out of bed, shivering on contact with the cold floor, and tiptoed to the window. Sometime in the last few hours, the storm had passed, and the waxing moon hung pregnant in the sky on a bed of clouds.

_"Rrrr,"_ the dog growled, eyes intent on something outside that she could not see.

"What's up with you, dog?" She opened the window as quietly as she could and pushed her head out into the dripping night. Nothing moved, and there was no noise other than that of water. She pulled back in. "Seriously," she said, but Bruno's attention did not falter, and as she looked on, he tensed.

_"Wrrf!"_ he said lowly, and Beatrice followed his eyes down to the woods across the river.

From somewhere just inside the tree line shone the light of a bobbing lantern, and in its shadows, she briefly thought she saw the shape of a sharp figure with a pointed hat.

Beatrice's heart skipped half a beat at the sight, though she knew straight away that it wasn't what it seemed. It was only an illusion from the trees, from light glinting off the water. Bruno, though, would not be mollified, and he gave another breathy woof before leaving the window to run down the stairs. Beatrice was torn for a second on what to do. Some person was, perhaps, lurking in the woods outside her family's home at night, which was not something she wanted to confront. But on the other hand, she didn't want anyone else in her family to have to confront it, either. And maybe, just maybe, that lurker could be someone she'd been wanting to speak to very badly lately. She went to the wardrobe with trembling hands and pulled out a wool cloak and her boots, which she didn't even take enough time to tie fully before sneaking downstairs. Bruno was waiting tensely inside the front door, and when she opened it, shot out like a bullet. Beatrice followed him with more caution, and closed the door carefully behind. The world was wet, the moon was bright, and it had gotten unexpectedly cold. She wrapped the cloak tighter around her shoulders.

Bruno stood on the bridge, barking, but not so loud that it would wake anybody else in the house. He was a good dog. She saw as she drew close to the forest that the light was still out there, now disappearing steadily into the trees. The thought occurred to her that she should have grabbed her father's gun; no matter now. "Hey," she called out, placing a hand on the dog's head for reassurance. "Hey, who goes there?"

She hadn't expected to hear a response, but the words drifted back to her from far away:

_"Greg," _someone was calling. _"Greg!"_

Beatrice froze. It couldn't be. It couldn't possibly.

"Hello?" she said again, but the voice still did not speak to her.

_"Greg!"_ it cried, and the light faded slowly away.

"Wait!" she yelled, and as she did, Bruno gave another bark and bolted toward the woods. Beatrice hitched up her nightgown and started right on his tail with a racing heart. They broke the tree line one after the other. Water dripped down on her head from the bare branches as she passed beneath them. "Wait!" she called again, leaping over a large raised root after her dog. She wanted to call out the name on the tip of her tongue, but didn't dare risk being wrong. She couldn't stand to get her hopes up.

The voice called, _"Greg!"_

She couldn't see what they were following, but Bruno seemed to know where he was going. Further they ran into the woods, her shoes loose on her feet and her cloak splashed with mud. Thick branches filtered out the moonlight the deeper they went in, and cast the ground in shadow. The cold air burned her throat, but she wouldn't stop running until Bruno did.

Finally, she and the dog drew up next to each other by a big, smooth birch. "Where are you?" she called, cupping her hands. She hardly had enough breath in her to get the words out. "Hello? W… Wirt!" It _was_ his voice. It had to have been. "Wirt!" But nobody called back, and there was no more light to be seen. Even Bruno seemed to have lost the trail, and he stood panting, nose turning this way and that in the air to catch the scent of his quarry. As Beatrice caught her breath and began to stand up again fully, she realized that she had no idea how far they'd gone from the house. She was not overly familiar with these woods at the best of times, let alone in the middle of the night, and they were deep in a thicket of trees, with no stars clearly visible overhead and no trail to follow.

"You stupid dog," she said weakly, but when Bruno looked up at her, she knew she didn't mean it. He seemed to have completely forgotten that he'd been intent on a pursuit just seconds ago, and wagged his tail at her briefly before trotting by with his head to the ground.

She turned to follow him, but stopped suddenly as she found herself confronted by an enormous dark shape looming just a few yards away. For a second she was so startled that she almost jumped backward, but with a moment's greater consideration she realized that the flat form was just that of a fat, mossy stone wall, here spread between two giant, gnarled oak trees.

"What the…?"

She had never seen anything like it before, nor heard of it, which was unusual considering how much time her brothers spent in the forest. It was perhaps twelve feet high, and extended in both directions for as far as she could see, which in the depths of these trees was not very far. She stopped a few feet short of it while Bruno went scouting along its base; she was a little nervous to see something so strange, but it did not give off a particularly menacing vibe. It was just a wall. Somewhere on the other side, a frog was croaking. Slowly, she reached out a cold hand to touch it. The green stones were slimy and speckled with moonlight.

Bruno made a small noise behind her, and she turned. Between the roots of one of the oak trees by the wall, there lay the prone form of a boy. The dog nuzzled under his arm and gave Beatrice a quizzical look.

Her eyes widened. "Oh my gosh," she said, rushing forward to kneel in the wet leaves. She pressed a hand against the boy's forehead. He was warm, perhaps unusually so, considering he was barefoot and wearing cotton pajamas. "Are you alright?" she asked him as he stirred. His eyes opened slowly and he squinted up at her. He wore glasses, and looked to be about the age of her brother Vernon.

For a second they were both quiet; and then he said, as if he couldn't believe she was true, "…Beatrice?"

She blinked. "Huh?"

"Beatrice!" he repeated, rubbing his eyes. She was badly confused, but as his head fell into a rare patch of light, any words she might have had died on her lips. For a second she couldn't think what to say.

In the end, she just said, "Greg?"

"Beatrice!" he said once more, eyes big like pies. "Oh my gosh! How are you here?"

"I…" she said, lost for words. "That's – I-I live here. How are _you_ here?"

"I dunno!" he said, spreading his arms and looking down at himself where he lay in the mud at the tree's base. "Is this just the sort of thing that happens when you hit your head? It's probably a dream." Beatrice herself wondered if it wasn't. "You look just the same as I remember," Greg said, smiling at her.

"Oh," she said. "And you…" But she couldn't return the compliment, because Greg did not look like she remembered at all. He looked so different that she hardly recognized him. She'd never been able to imagine that Greg could be anything other than a tiny child; now, almost the only thing he had in common with her memory of him was the extraordinarily trusting smile on his face. He hadn't been able to say nearly the same thing about her.

"You look… good," she finished lamely.

"Hey, thanks!" Bruno pushed his nose into Greg's cheek, and Greg gasped as he noticed the dog. "My best friend!" he said, putting out his hands for him.

Beatrice said, "What are you talking about?" as Bruno jumped forward happily to ply him with kisses. "He's our dog."

"Really?" Greg asked between wet assaults on his face. "Huh. Lots of coincidences hereabouts. And speaking of friends," he added as he finally wrestled Bruno off of him, tail wagging madly, "I thought I heard Jason Funderburker out here. You haven't seen him around lately, have you?"

"What? Your frog?" she asked, crossing her arms at the boy. "No. Why would I have?"

"Well, because a couple months ago, he, you know…" Greg stopped. He took a little breath and leaned his head back against the tree trunk. "It's like Dad said," he said carefully. "Bullfrogs don't live that long."

"What are you –?" But Beatrice saw the heartbroken look on Greg's face, and felt stricken as she realized what he was saying. "Oh," she said. "Greg. I'm… really sorry."

"It's alright," he said gamely. He was keeping it together remarkably well. "We had a good run. And I thought, you know, even if he couldn't be with me anymore, at least I knew he was here. It sounded like he might be around somewhere." Again, a frog croaked from somewhere close by, and Greg perked up to listen.

"If Jason Funderburker… left… why do you think he'd be here?" Beatrice kept her question as pointed as she could, but just got a very odd look from the boy.

"Where else would he be?" he asked. Beatrice frowned, and stood up as she decided finally that her nightgown had been ruined badly enough for one night.

Greg copied her actions, leaning heavily on the tree to make it to his feet in the slick mud. She wrapped her cloak around her arms and said quietly, "Is Wirt with you?"

"No, I don't think so," he said, wiping his hands on his pajama knees. "But I wish he was. I know he'd like to see you."

"Oh, I mean… nah," she said dispassionately, leaning into the mossy green wall behind her. "Nah. I'm sure he's been fine."

"Well, yeah, he's definitely fine," Greg agreed without hesitation. "But he still misses you. I know it." Beatrice blushed, and hoped it was dark enough that Greg couldn't see.

"How's he doing?" she asked. "Does… does he still play the clarinet?"

"Yeah, and a bassoon too. He went to school for that one."

She couldn't help smiling at that. "I thought he didn't have the embouchure for the bassoon."

Greg said, "I don't know what that is, but I guess he found it!" and they both kind of laughed. Beatrice relaxed more fully into the wall at her back. The thick moss made it an almost comfortable place to rest. The niggling thought ate at her mind that Wirt must have changed just as much as his brother had. The idea didn't upset her, but it didn't exactly make her happy either.

"Just so long as he's doing well," she said, more to herself than anything.

"I think so." She looked over at Greg, who was polishing his glasses. He put them back on, and grinned up at her. "I don't get to see him too often sometimes. He works in a drug store in the city and his apartment smells like pants. But I think he's happy. And he's in love," he added.

"Oh?" Beatrice asked, scrunching up handfuls of her nightgown.

"Yeah. Don't tell anybody, but –" he glanced around conspiratorially "— he bought a ring. At Christmas, he's gonna ask."

She flexed her fistfuls of cloth. "That's sweet," she said. "She's a really – a lucky girl."

"Pssh," Greg said, rolling his eyes. "He's the one who's lucky to have her. I love the guy and all, but Sara's way out of his league."

She said, "Sara?" rolling the name over her tongue to try and remember where she'd heard it before. "Isn't that the same one who…?" Greg nodded. "Huh," she said, prepared to express surprise, but then she realized she wasn't surprised at all. Wirt was exactly the sort to make a lifetime love out of a childhood crush. It was enough to make one wonder what might have happened if they'd never had to go their separate ways. "Romantic fool," she sighed.

"Isn't he just?" Greg said knowingly. Beatrice didn't tell him that she wasn't talking about Wirt.

She said, "I thought I heard him calling for you out here."

"Really?" Greg looked surprised. "Maybe he's trying to wake me up." She tilted her head, the question implicit, and Greg grinned sheepishly. "I mighta eaten a lot of Halloween candy and decided to run around the kitchen," he said. "And I mighta slipped and hit my head while Wirt was supposed to be watching me. Right after he told me not to run in the kitchen."

She wasn't sure if she was supposed to smile or frown at that, so she went for something in between. "It doesn't look like you got hurt," she said, brushing twigs and leaves out of Greg's hair with a cold hand. He was so much taller now than she remembered.

"No, I think I'm okay. I feel okay. Maybe my brain is just kinda flipping out from the bump. …Ohh man." His cheerfully bemused expression flickered briefly into worry. "I _really_ hope I didn't die. Wirt'll kill me."

An upset feeling turned over in Beatrice's stomach. "Don't act like this is a place for the dead," she muttered, rubbing her hands together. "It's not."

Greg looked genuinely surprised to hear her say that, and then said exactly the thing she'd feared he would.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "You're here."

Beatrice said nothing, but squared her jaw and looked away; Bruno pushed his head into her knees, and whined when she wouldn't acknowledge him. "Beatrice?" Greg said, but she didn't respond. She turned her gaze up at the moon, half-full in the sky, just like it always was. The same moon as every night, in the same year as every year. And how many years now?

"Greg," she said after a minute, "you must be… eleven now, right?"

"Twelve," he said. So even longer, then. "Beatrice, what's wrong? Am I upsetting you?" She felt a brush against her hand; Greg had taken it in his. "I'm sorry," he said, eyes big. "Whatever I did."

She couldn't manage a reassuring smile, so she shook her head instead. "Don't be," she muttered. "You didn't do anything wrong." She squeezed his hand back, so much bigger now than it had used to be. Somehow, she'd always imagined that if and when she met Wirt and Greg again, they would all be much the same, as if they'd never separated at all. Greg was older than most of her brothers now, though, and Wirt was going to be married soon. And her? She'd be turning seventeen in a few weeks. Just like she always did. Wherever those two called home, it was different from any place she knew, because it had let them change in ways she couldn't imagine doing anymore. Time flowed in circles around her, and she was caught up in the cycle. They'd moved forward, while she could not. She closed her eyes and balled her free hand very tightly.

She was, after it all, one of those lost in the Unknown, and jealous of the living.

Greg wrapped his arms around her middle, and squeezed. "Umf," she said as he pushed the air out of her. He was much stronger than he looked.

"I'm really sorry you're upset," he said, "and I wish I could make you feel better." He hugged her solidly. Water dripped, and the frog's croaking drew nearer. Beatrice wrapped her arms around Greg's back and they let themselves stay that way for a while.

"I think this is helping," she said gently.

"Good," Greg said, and gave another hard squeeze before finally letting go. "You know, it's been a long time, but we didn't forget." She looked down at him, standing in his little patch of moonlight against the forest wall. "Wirt and I go every year, to bring flowers for you and your family. In case you were worried about that." He fidgeted a little. She didn't have to ask what he was talking about. She already knew. And somehow, knowing it was some small relief. Beatrice smiled at him.

They both looked up as a frog's heavy croak sounded once again, this time from just a few feet away. Greg's eyes grew wide.

"Jason Funderburker?" he asked.

There was a brief moment of silence, and then another ribbit, and the big bullfrog suddenly leapt out of the shadows toward the boy, who received him so gaily that sheer joy spun them around in circles twice. "Jason Funderburker!" he cried, lifting the frog high above his head. "Oh, Jason Funderburker, you found us!" He nuzzled the frog like a puppy, and the frog returned the gesture with the most amphibious smile Beatrice had ever seen.

"Do you remember Beatrice?" Greg asked, turning both of them around to face her. "It's been a while." Jason Funderburker croaked. "I knew you wouldn't forget," Greg said. "Oh man –" Once again, he squeezed him tight around his middle. Greg's voice was kind of thin, and he whispered into the frog's back, "I missed you a lot, buddy."

Beatrice was struck by the feeling that she was intruding on something very personal, and turned away as something caught her ear.

_"Greg?"_ From the other side of the wall, someone was calling again.

Greg looked up. "Already?" he asked the night at large. "But I just found Jason Funderburker."

_"Come on, Greg!"_ The voice, which sounded very worried, and a lot like Wirt's, did not seem to care, and the boy sighed.

"I think I have to wake up now," he said. Beatrice gave him a wan smile. He looked down at the frog in his arms, who returned his gaze curiously. "I was wondering," he said, looking concerned. "Jason Funderburker doesn't have a home in the Unknown. He's all alone out in the woods where I can't make sure he's safe." The frog croaked sadly. Greg looked up. "Could you take care of him, Beatrice?" he asked.

"What?" she said.

"I know I can trust you, and you'll make sure he eats well, because you know which maggots are tastiest." She did not appreciate being reminded of her maggot days, and grimaced. "He doesn't have to be with you all the time. He's got his own stuff going on. But he should have a roof over his head and a family who loves him." Greg's big eyes were unforgiving. "Please, Beatrice?"

"I –" He was holding the frog out to her. She blinked at it. It smiled. She sighed. "…Okay," she said, and she took the frog. He was sticky and heavy, but not as sticky or as heavy as he looked.

Greg's smile couldn't have been wider. "Oh, thank you, Beatrice!" he said, reaching in to give her another enormous hug around the ribcage and, again, almost knocking the wind out of her. His eyes sparkled. "I know it's a lot to ask. I promise the next time I have a near-death experience I'll come visit again."

She gave him a crooked smile, and said, "You better."

Greg pulled away with a starry grin as a soft light touched their faces. They looked up. Somewhere on the other side of the wall, it looked like the light of a lantern was bobbing through the night. _"Greg!"_ Wirt's voice called again.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," Greg grumbled, and shot Beatrice a knowing look. "He's probably really freaked out," he confided. "I wonder if he called the ambulance yet. But no, he's kind of a tightwad. He's probably gonna drive me there himself." She laughed at that. "I should definitely wake up now."

"Yeah," she said, "You probably should." Greg began to walk away, but looked back again just before passing into the shadow between the wall and the old oak tree.

"Goodbye, Beatrice," he said. "Goodbye, Jason Funderburker! I'm really glad I got to see you again."

Jason Funderburker croaked, and Beatrice tucked him under one arm and lifted the other to wave. "Goodbye, Greg," she said. "Say hi to Wirt for me."

"I will if I remember this!" he said happily, and he too waved before stepping back into the darkness. Slowly, the shape of him blended into the black of the forest, and Beatrice lowered her hand. She looked upward. The light from the other side of the wall had disappeared.

The woods hushed in her ear, suggesting what she would see if she were to climb over to the other side. Wirt might be waiting there for her, and Greg too, in whatever place they called their home, where people grew up, and where the moon changed every single night.

But Jason Funderburker said, _"Rrrbt,"_ and she knew that he was probably right.

"Then if we can't follow them," she said, looking down at the frog, "what do you think we'd find instead?"

_"Brrrk,"_ said Jason Funderburker.

Beatrice said, "I don't know either." A breeze whisked through the trees and sprinkled her with water, but she didn't shiver. She thought for a moment of the moonless roads that might await, and what she could become as she walked them. Older, wiser, maybe a new person altogether. But the truth was, it had been a very long night, and her heart was already back with her sisters in bed.

"You know," she said finally, giving the frog a pat on the head, "maybe tonight isn't the night to find out."

Jason Funderburker said, _"Rrk,"_ and closed his eyes with a smile.

* * *

Bruno led the three of them home on a trackless forest path, and Beatrice did her best to wash herself before going back to bed. Her nightgown was ruined, so she stole one of her father's undershirts from the line in the cellar, and slipped back under the blankets next to Beth with the moon falling in the same place on the wooden floor as it had when she left. On the ground by her side of the bed, the dog and the frog curled up happily; she was glad to see them getting along. She was pretty sure her brothers were going to really like Jason when they met him in the morning.

For the entire rest of the night, Beatrice wasn't sure that she managed to fall completely back asleep, because her thoughts were punctuated always with an awareness of the room around her, and the light of the moon, and her sister's knee in her ribs. Still, she rose in the sunny morning surprisingly refreshed, and with the very distinct feeling that she had dreamed a dream where Wirt, tall enough now to put her under his chin, offered an embrace to thank her for watching Greg while he couldn't.

"Hey there, Bee," her father said from his place in front of the fire as she entered the dining room for breakfast, pulling his pipe from his mouth and giving her a wink. "You feeling any better today?"

A small tweet sounded close to her elbow, and she looked to the wall to see a bluebird on the open windowsill. She blinked at it, and it blinked back, like a dare. This time, she smiled.

"Yeah, Dad," she said, turning back to her father. "I think I am."

"Breakfast!" her mother yelled from the kitchen. "Come one, come all!" The stairs thumped loudly as her brothers and sisters responded to the call, and above it all she heard Harold Jr. cry out in surprise, _"Holy moly, would you look at this frog!" _

So the family convened on a sunny November morning and broke bread together with laughter, and talk, and a fire at their backs, just like always, and Beatrice felt for the first time in memory that it was alright that things could be this way forever if she so chose, because she knew now that she had a choice.

Someday, she would see what lay in wait for her over the wall, but until then, these were years worth reliving.


	4. Year Ten, Year Eleven

4

It was hard, being six months away from being able to get your driver's license, and the want for a car of his own was impacting Greg particularly strongly tonight. After arriving home at five o' clock that afternoon to discover the answering-machine message from Wirt telling him to 'get to the hospital _now,' _he'd had desperate trouble arranging a ride which could make the requisite stops beforehand, since his parents wouldn't be arriving home from their Florida vacation until later that night. Bo Cummings had pulled through nicely by dropping him off at the drug store, but after making his purchases there and at the florist's and then walking close to a mile to get to St. Jermaine's, Greg had arrived at his destination tired and sweaty, with melting chocolate and slightly smooshed flowers on hand. Normally he would have been prone to dwell on the extra inconvenience brought to him by his inability to drive himself around, but not today. All of his available tension was directed at exactly one thing, and that was the clock.

By now, the sun had gone down, the flowers had drooped further, and the candy he'd bought at the drug store to help Sara and Wirt celebrate had slowly been whittled down to a few handfuls left in his pockets that he told himself he wasn't going to touch, but Greg was still as acutely nervous as he had been the moment he arrived. He'd had some trouble reaching his parents to tell them the news, but they'd finally called from the airport when they touched down, and promised to be at the hospital before eleven. After five hours in the waiting room, he'd yet to hear anything from the doctors, but it could be any minute now. He was primed to go, and his electric energy was translating directly into his Tetris game.

He was just about finished making mincemeat of level seventeen when the old lady in the seat next to his started peering over his shoulder. "Sorry, young man," she said sweetly as he paused the game to look up at her. "My grandson is about your age. It's almost his birthday and I never know what boys are into nowadays."

"Oh. Well, yeah, we're definitely into this," Greg said, turning the Game Boy over in his hands. "My brother gave it to me last Christmas and it's the best present I've ever gotten."

"Oh? It looks expensive. Your brother must love you a lot."

"Yeah," Greg said, sitting with his arm flung over the back of the chair. "Probably still feels pretty guilty for almost letting me die alone in the woods that one time, too."

The old woman asked, "Pardon?" but Greg's attention was taken by the sound of the ward door opening behind the desk.

A nurse stepped out with her eyes on the clipboard in her hands. She flipped the page up, and asked the room at large, "Is there a… Gregory out here?"

"Yes!" Greg cried, nearly jumping out of his seat before catching himself. "I mean, uh, yes, ma'am?" he said, straightening his glasses. "That's me."

"Aren't we excited," said the nurse with a smile. "You must be the new uncle."

"The…? Oh my God." Greg's eyes went wide. The time had finally come.

"They're ready to see you now. Would you like to come in?"

_"Aaaaaooogh,_" Greg inhaled vocally. "Okay. It's time." He was almost vibrating with anticipation as he gathered up the flowers from the seat. The only thing that kept him from running down the hall like a cheetah was the knowledge that it would get him kicked out of the ward. "What time was it?" he asked the nurse as she led him through the doorway behind the desk. "What time exactly?"

"Time of birth?" She checked her chart and said, "She was born tonight, October 31st, at 10:03 PM. Happy Halloween."

"Ten-oh-three." Greg was going to commit that number to memory forever. This was about to be the best day of his life. "Wait, did you say she?"

"That's right," said the nurse as she stopped next to a door with Wirt's last name on it. "It's a healthy, happy baby girl." And she pushed the door open to let him inside.

Greg stepped in as quietly as he could, though the wrappers on the flowers in his arms crinkled loudly. Sara was laying in the hospital bed with her hair all ruffled, and Wirt sat in a plastic chair by her elbow. Neither of them moved when he entered; Sara was fast asleep, and Wirt's head was low over the bundle he held in his arms.

"Hey!" Greg whispered as the nurse closed the door behind him. He set the flowers on the table by the entry and unloaded half-melted candy from his pockets. Wirt finally raised his eyes. His hair was a bird's nest and he looked overall as though someone had put him through a clothes dryer.

"Hey, Candy Pants," he said. Greg gave him a look, and continued to pull candy out of his pants. "What's all this?"

"I brought you flowers to celebrate," said Greg. "And chocolate."

"You didn't need to do that," Wirt said as his younger brother approached, pulling a second chair from the wall and plopping down in it with a thump. "Shh, shh, not so loud. Don't wake her."

"Could I? She looks pretty out of it," Greg said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at Sara.

"Oh, well, yeah, no, she's super drugged," Wirt said, smiling for a brief moment before immediately sobering up. "But not her. Her." Tenderly, he pulled the blankets away from the bundle in his arms so Greg could get his first look. He leaned in, wide-eyed. The baby girl sleeping in the folds was big-eared, delicate-featured, and exactly the color of a caramel apple, red-blushed cheeks and all.

"Wow," Greg breathed, hardly able to believe it. "She's perfect."

"Yeah," Wirt said, sitting back, not taking his eyes off of her. "Yeah, she is." He sounded in awe.

"She's a girl, though. What's with that?"

"I have no idea!" said Wirt. "It's a boy, they said. Like three times. We told everyone it was a boy. The room's blue and everything." He shifted the baby expertly in his arms so that he could reach to run his hands through his hair; she didn't even stir. "We were going to name him after Sara's grandpa. You know, the one who did Normandy. We don't have any girls' names." He looked excessively distraught by that.

"You didn't talk about it at all?"

"We were moving! I had work! There was a lot of other stuff going on. What do you name a girl? Jane? Anne? Uh… Gretchen? No, that's terrible…"

"It's alright, brother," Greg said, patting Wirt's shoulder to calm him. "We'll brainstorm together." On the bed next to them, Sara murmured and shifted, and then quieted down. They watched her until she stopped moving. Wirt had a look on his face of overwhelming adoration.

"Mom and Dad said they'll be here soon," Greg told his brother.

"Then I'll enjoy the peace and quiet until they show up," Wirt said. He glanced down at the infant in his arms and blinked. "This feels crazy," he said quietly.

"No kidding," Greg agreed. "I can't believe you made that." The smile on Wirt's face was wiped away swiftly when he added, "Because she doesn't look anything like you at all."

His brother gave him a sour look. "Thanks a lot."

"Seriously, no resemblance whatsoever. You sure you're related?" Greg asked, but when the other's face started to turn red, he recanted. "Aah, I'm just teasing you, Wirt. Look, she's got your ears. See?"

"Oh." Wirt examined the ears in question, and seemed satisfied. "Yeah, I think she does. Wow, they're really big. That is definitely my fault." He pursed his lips and hesitated for just a second. "Do you, uh… want to hold her?"

"Oh, man," Greg said, eyes wide. "Can I?"

"Sure. Here. You just support the head with your elbow and… there." The baby's weight settled into Greg's arms. She was heavier than she looked, and very warm. "Wow," he said again. Worry bit at him suddenly. "What if I drop her?"

"You're sitting down, Greg."

"Yeah, but what if?"

"I'll kill you. So don't."

"Mm." He rocked the baby lightly, but that even that much movement felt like inviting disaster, so he stopped. "It doesn't scare you?"

"I'm pretty used to it. I never dropped you." Greg looked up, and Wirt gave him half of a smile. "And you were way heavier than this when you were born."

"You just called me a fat baby! I can't believe it." But Greg couldn't stop grinning, so he turned the smile down to his niece (he had a niece!) instead. His glasses slipped down his nose, and he very carefully extracted a hand to push them back up.

"Holding her's the easy part, though," Wirt said. "I mean – they said it would be a boy. I was kind of ready for that. Do you think having a girl is a lot different than a boy?"

"I don't know," Greg said. "How would I know that?"

"Great. I mean, I don't know either." He was wringing his hands; a nervous tick made him look like he was fingering an invisible clarinet. "Greg, I gotta be honest, I – I have no idea what to do after we leave this room."

"You get to be in charge of the best little person ever born," Greg said, pointing at the baby. "What else is there to it?"

"Yeah, well," Wirt said in a low voice. "You remember what happened the last time I was responsible for a kid." He looked very, very tired.

"Hey," Greg said, sitting forward in his chair. "That was a long time ago, Wirt."

"It doesn't matter," Wirt said. "It was still me who did it. I was a horrible brother. What if… what if I'm a horrible dad, too?" He was violently distressing the edge of his sweater. "What if things get hard and I decide to give up? What if I'm like _my_ dad?"

"You won't be," Greg said firmly, and placed the baby back into her father's arms. Wirt looked a little startled for just a second, but still took her without hesitation. "'Cause you're not perfect, but you know how to learn from your mistakes. I would know. I lived them." He gave his brother two thumbs-up.

"I could make some really bad mistakes, though. Mistakes that ruin her life." He stared at his daughter like he wanted her to reassure him. "When I think about that, I don't know how I'm supposed to make any decisions at all."

Wirt clearly needed a source of confidence, and that was a function Greg could fill. "Well, dropping her's almost the worst thing you could do, and you've already got that under wraps," he said. "You'll figure out the rest as you go. You know how I know?"

"How?" Wirt looked like he genuinely wanted the answer. Greg leaned forward and stuck his elbow gently in his brother's ribs.

"Because," he said, "her dad is the King of the Gnomes, and he wouldn't ever let his people down!"

Wirt put a hand on his face and groaned, "It wasn't a gnome costume," but between that and Greg's winning grin and wiggling eyebrows, he finally cracked a smile, and the two brothers sat quiet, marveling at the new little light that was bundled in pink cotton between them. Outside the room's window, the shape of the full moon was bisected by the silhouette of an oak tree's branch, growing near the building. If he hadn't had to come to the hospital, Greg would have been out having the time of his life with friends right now, because it was the most perfect Halloween night you could think of out there, the kind that made you shiver for the pleasure of being out at the highest point of fall. The baby kicked a little and shoved a tiny confectionery-colored fist out into the air.

Greg had a thought. "Hey. What about 'Autumn'?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"Autumn, like it is right now. I think that would be a good name."

"That's –" Wirt stopped to think about it. After a minute, he said, "…Yeah. Autumn."

"Autumn."

"I mean, I have to talk to Sara first, but… Autumn." He stared down at the little baby girl, still sleeping peacefully. "I like that, Greg." Greg smiled and tucked his legs up on the chair. Wirt brushed his thumb against her chin, and her hand wrapped around the finger reflexively, which was just about the cutest thing Greg had ever seen. Wirt blinked, and then smiled a little. "Hi there, Autumn," he said finally. "I'm your dad."

"And I'm your uncle," Greg whispered, leaning in so she could hear.

"This is your uncle, Candy Pants."

"I'm your uncle Greg."

"And that's your mom," Wirt said, tilting the baby toward Sara. "She's the best."

"I'm the best uncle."

"And you're gonna meet our mom, and Greg's dad, and Sara's parents too," Wirt said. The baby wriggled, and snuggled down into the blankets, pulling her father's finger with her. "We're your family." He hesitated. "I hope you like it here."

She yawned.

Greg said, "I think that's a yes," and Wirt smiled at him.

"Knock-knock," came an announcement as the door cracked open. The nurse who had led Greg into the room peeked in. As she did, Sara stirred again and finally opened her eyes.

"Mmwhaa…?" she asked, squinting around the room blearily.

"You're awake," the nurse said. "How do you feel, dear?"

"Oh my God," Sara said, putting her hands over her face. "I feel like I just pushed an entire turkey dinner out of my..." She noticed that Greg was in the room. "…gut."

"You more or less did," Wirt said. "Uh… sorry about that." But he was still smiling, and he moved close to Sara with the baby. "I think it was worth it."

"Easy for you to say," Sara said wryly, but she took the little girl from him with tired, sparkling eyes.

"You've got visitors in the lobby," said the nurse. "Looks to me like two sets of very happy new grandparents. All the balloons say 'boy' on them, but I decided to let you all be the ones to break the news." Greg laughed; he liked this woman. "Would you like me to send them in?"

"Could you give us about twenty minutes?" Sara asked, pulling up the shoulder of her hospital gown. "I'd like a little time."

"Absolutely, dear," the nurse said.

"Here, I'll go too," Greg offered, and he stood up from his chair; he wanted to ask his parents about their trip to Florida anyway. He made it to the door, saw the flowers on the table, and then backtracked to set them at the foot of Sara's bed. He mouthed to her, _Good job!_, gave her and Wirt another thumbs-up, made one more quick trip to sprinkle some candy on top of the bouquet, and finally backed out of the room to let them have their moment.

Just before the door closed behind him, he thought he heard Wirt ask, "So, we were thinking… How do you feel about the name 'Autumn'?"

* * *

"You've got to stop wiggling," Greg said as he struggled to get shoes on his niece's feet. It was the last detail of the costume and she was being less than cooperative. "Come on, Oddball. No, don't kick… There we go." He stepped back to admire his handiwork as Autumn perched on the edge of the guest bed. She burbled happily and reached for him with sticky fingers. "Perfect."

"Greg!" Wirt called up the stairs. "Come on! The party starts at one and we should be there to help Mom set up."

"Comingg," Greg called back, even though it was only just three minutes past ten, and they had more than plenty of time. "You ready, Oddball?" he asked, and scooped up the one-year-old with a little bounce. She grabbed at his glasses. "Agh, no, don't do that. Alright. You want to go impress your dad?"

"Geg," she said.

"Excellent," he said, and they headed downstairs.

Wirt was waiting by the front door, dressed to go, with his eyes on the clock. "Finally," he said as they approached. "Mom said she doesn't want us to worry about helping, but I know she's secretly expecting us and we can't just –" He stopped as he looked up. "Greg," he said, flatly. "What is she wearing?"

Greg grinned at Autumn. "I knew he'd like it." She clapped.

"Is that seriously –?" His eyes jumped from the little red cone hat on her head to the tiny blue cloak around her shoulders, hand-stitched all. "Greg…"

"She's the gnome princess!" Greg said, lifting the baby up above his head so she screamed happily. "We wanted her first birthday to remind her of her heritage."

"'We?'" Wirt said, looking chagrined. "You said you were just going to make her a pumpkin costume!"

"I _was,"_ Greg said, "but then Sara thought of this instead, and we decided to keep it a secret from you until the last minute so you couldn't veto it." He plopped Autumn into her father's arms. "Happy Halloween, Wirt!"

"Oh my God," Wirt said as the baby grabbed at his hair. "I just realized something. I am _never_ going to live that costume down. You won't ever let me. Someday I'll be in hospice, dying slowly, and you'll gather my great-grandchildren around to tell them about the costume, while I'm too weak to stop you."

"And as you finally expire," Greg said, "the last thing you'll hear is their question: 'But what was he thinking?'" Wirt's ears were turning red, and Greg gave him a hearty wink. "Now come on, brother, one o' clock steadily approaches!" He grabbed his jacket and bounced out the door, and Wirt reluctantly followed behind, wrapping a scarf around his neck and tilting his head back to avoid being poked in the eye by the hat's pointy tip.

It had turned out to be a beautiful and crisp fall morning, the sky bright and caught somewhere in between shades of blue and gray. Wirt swung his daughter up onto his shoulders, and she happily wrapped her arms around his forehead to stay upright.

"You have a baby crown," Greg said.

"I'm the king of the babies," Wirt smiled, bouncing Autumn up and down. She screeched with laughter and clung tight, and they walked content for a while, gazing up at the bare trees above. The road to Greg's house wasn't far, or no more so than the road between any two places in town, because Aberdale was not a big place, though not one that Sara and Wirt had ever really considered leaving for anywhere else. It was their home, plain and simple, where they'd grown up and met and eventually married, and bought a little old house together on a street covered in roses and ivy. It was where they worked, her in the hospital's pharmacy, him teaching music at the high school, only two rooms away from where Greg had his drama class, and it was where, come what may, they thought they'd spend the rest of their lives. Greg often wondered that anyone could be so content to stay in one place forever when the world was so big and fantastic and full of new things to see, but Aberdale was a town built of families who had come long ago and chosen never to leave, which perhaps made him the odd one out. Personally, he planned to join the traveling circus on the day he graduated from high school.

A temperate breeze caught the brothers as they crossed the street, pushing the smell of dry grass and rotting leaves through the air. "So, uh… are you still dating that one girl?" Wirt asked after a few minutes, with the tone of one who is looking more to fill silence than learn something new. "Melanie, I think? The one with the purple hair."

"Eh," Greg said, rubbing the back of his head. "Not anymore." Talking about girls was one of those things he was more open to doing with his brother than his father – or his mother, no matter how much she pried.

"Oh," said Wirt. "Sorry to hear that."

"No, it's really okay. She was kinda all over me and I wasn't so into it. 'Dating' is probably a strong word for what she wanted." He pulled off his glasses to wipe them with his sleeve. "She broke up with me last week when I said no one too many times."

"I didn't know you had that effect on women," Wirt said with brows raised, looking down on his brother's bespectacled person. He could still do that, look down at Greg, but not by much, and Greg had plenty of time yet to catch up.

"I know, right?" Greg said, innocent. "It must be because I'm so self-assured and charismatic." Wirt rolled his eyes and put a hand on his brother's face to push him away, but they both smiled. "This is gonna be a great day," Greg said, jumping ahead to kick a rock on the sidewalk as they passed by the Daniels' garden. He was always up for a birthday party, and it had been his idea to host Autumn's first at their mother's, where there was more room for relatives who hadn't yet had a chance to meet the family's youngest. Sara had left an hour ago to help set up, while the brothers stayed behind to change and bathe the birthday girl with plans to catch up as soon as possible.

"I suppose so," Wirt said, seeming only to agree because he had to. Social gatherings tired him, and he had been happy to displace this one to somewhere other than his own home, even if it meant having to take a walk with a mostly pre-ambulatory child.

"You'll love it," Greg said, slinging an arm around his brother's shoulder and ruffling Autumn on the back of the head. "There'll be balloons, and chips – everyone likes chips! – and weird conversations with cousins you haven't seen since middle school –"

"Joy," Wirt grumbled.

"—and ice cream cake, because I'm your brother, and I love you." Wirt narrowed his eyes. "And by that, I mean I love watching you wipe ice cream off of every surface Oddball touches for the next week."

"Why, you little –" Wirt reached out a hand to swipe at his brother, but Greg leapt away nimbly.

"Ha-_ha!" _he cried. "Can't catch me!" He bounced up a retaining wall to their right, jumped down again from eight feet up and rolled with the impact, then leapt back to his feet and ran up ahead to perform a cartwheel on the sidewalk.

"Ta-daa!" he cried as he righted himself. Autumn laughed and kicked her feet, narrowly missing Wirt's chin.

"Show-off," Wirt said as the little girl continued to wiggle and bounce on top of his shoulders. "Look, now she's worked up. We should have brought the stroller."

"Naah, you got this, daddy-o!" Greg said, popping up at Wirt's side with wide jazz hands for Autumn, which did not help her excitement.

"Oh, no you don't," Wirt said, pulling her down. "You started this, and now it's your problem." He held her out, and Greg found himself with the one-year-old in his arms now.

Greg said, "Aah, that's okay, Oddball. I'm more fun than your boring ol' dad anyway."

"Ba," she said, and grabbed at something in the air over his shoulder.

"Maybe it's better she wear herself out now," Wirt said as she continued to fuss in Greg's arms. "She can just sleep through the party."

"Not everyone wants to sleep through parties like you do," Greg said. "She takes after me. The more people around, the more energy she'll have. Isn't that right, Oddball?"

But Autumn didn't seem to be paying much attention to him. "Ba, ba!" she said again, and she raised a little fist to point so that Greg and Wirt finally saw just what had caught her attention. Directly to their right hung open the gates of the Eternal Garden, which they hadn't noticed they were passing by. Greg looked up at his brother, who seemed just as surprised as he felt. "Ba!" Autumn said again, more insistently this time. She grabbed in the direction of the gates with tiny toffee hands. "Ba!"

"You wanna?" Greg asked.

Wirt looked torn. "I don't know," he said, glancing up the road. "We really shouldn't let Mom and Sara set everything up themselves –" He looked back to see Greg and Autumn staring at him with equally big eyes. He met both of their gazes, and sighed. "— but I guess one o' clock is still a long time away," he finished, crossing his arms. "I suppose… we can stop for a _few_ minutes."

"Hey, teamwork!" Greg said, and raised a hand to his niece. She did not high-five him back, but did try to grab his fingers and put them in her mouth.

The three of them entered the Garden carefully, even the baby seeming to adopt an air of respect in the graveyard. Normally the brothers visited near dark, as sort of an unspoken tradition, and Greg couldn't fully remember the last time he'd seen the area in the daytime. It felt smaller when you could actually see everything. Autumn babbled happily just to have gotten what she wanted, and Wirt walked up ahead while Greg toted his niece slowly between the graves, heading toward the old corner. "Oh, look," he said, pausing near a cracked, embossed stone. He crouched down and wiped lichen from the name Quincy Endicott. "Hey, Unky," he said, putting Autumn on his knee. "How have you and Auntie been?" Autumn leaned forward and slapped her hands against the stone. "This is your great-uncle Endicott," Greg told her. She burbled. "He's a really generous guy."

Autumn was wiggling again, so Greg let her down on the ground and watched her carefully. She toddled uncertainly forward, dropping down to all fours every few steps before getting back up, intent on her dad a few yards away. She latched onto his ankle and finally plopped down hard, looking exhausted.

"She made it real far that time," Greg started to say as he came from behind and scooped her back up, but quieted when he realized where his brother was standing. Wirt had stopped in front of the largest tombstone in the Garden, the one etched with an entire family's worth of names. Greg bowed his head a little, not sure whether to smile or frown. He expected Wirt to speak, like he usually did, but he didn't. When he looked up, his brother's form was stiff and his expression curiously blank. That was weird, but Greg chose to move forward, and hesitantly cleared his own throat.

"Hi, Beatrice," he said, laying a hand on the granite. It was surprisingly warm for the weather. "It's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry. We should have been here last year. There was some… other stuff going on." He thought Wirt would smile at that. He didn't. "Anyway, there's someone here we wanted you to meet." Greg bounced Autumn gently in his arms. "Can you say, 'Hi, Beatrice'?" he asked her.

"Abeese?" she asked, and when he raised his hand in a waving motion, she copied it. "Abeese!" she said again, gesticulating madly. Greg grinned.

"We don't visit often enough anymore," he said to Wirt.

Wirt was quiet for a minute, but finally said, "Yeah," his eyes still on the tombstone for a second before breaking away, seeming guilty. It was strange, that life could get so busy it was easy to neglect simple things like this. Greg's weekends were nearly all consumed with theater, and Wirt had as little free time as any young working parent. Sometimes even the brothers didn't see each other for days at a time, despite being so near at school, but separation was what made days like this special, Greg thought. Wirt looked like he was going to say something more, but just shook his head and took Autumn back from Greg instead. The teenager rolled his shoulders appreciatively to excise their lingering strain and glanced casually toward the far cemetery wall, before doing a double-take.

"Wirt," he said, patting his brother's arm, and the other turned around.

"Oh," he said in surprise as he saw what Greg had. "Oh my God."

Greg had heard about it when it happened, but hadn't paid much attention at the time. In August, the last summer storm of the season had rolled through, causing no real damage, but managing to knock over some old trees, of which the graveyard's oak was one. It had fallen hard, and brought part of the cemetery wall down with it, collapsing a ten-foot expanse of rough-cut stone down the hillside. The tree had been removed by now, mostly, but yellow caution tape still lay across the upturned roots and crumbled rocks left in its wake, memorializing in violent yellow the barrier that had once stood like an institution to mark the edge of town.

The brothers approached slowly. "A-daa!" Autumn exclaimed, and pointed at the crumbling gap.

"No, I don't think so," Wirt said, hoisting her up against his shoulder. "That looks danger— Greg!" Greg was already halfway up the pile of stones, and gesturing to his brother. "Where are you going?"

"Into the unknooown," Greg said, wiggling his fingers spookily. "Come on, Wirt, you know exactly where I'm going."

"We don't have the time."

"We have _hours,"_ Greg said. "Don't kid yourself. Now follow me!"

Wirt frowned. "Maybe I don't feel like climbing over a bunch of rocks with this _baby,"_ he said, but he looked around to make sure nobody else was present and started to follow his brother across the rubble anyway. It was not particularly treacherous.

They emerged on the other side together, blinking in the sunlight as it seeped searing-bright through the clouds. The hillside spread out before them in a wide expanse of long browning grass that bottomed out in a small lake surrounded by gnarled trees. The wind seemed warmer here, and took them by the shoulders like an old acquaintance; Greg stepped down from the rocks onto something equally hard, and found it to be the rail for the old train tracks. He turned to look at the length of the wall collapsed across the permanent way, in some spots covering it completely. There was no path left for an impossible train to round the corner anymore.

Wirt had already started moving down the hill, stepping careful on the gradient to keep traction with the little girl trying to escape his arms. Greg followed along, running faster, and caught up to his brother in a few seconds. Halfway to the bottom, Autumn's wiggling had grown too disruptive, so they sat down, and Wirt let her go toddling away into the thick grass that was taller than she was, so that her little red cap was the only part of her visible above it.

Greg leaned back to take a deep breath of the chill sweet air. Briefly the clouds split above them, and he squinted in the bright white light. He'd never known such a beautiful October day as this. The mountains in the distance were colored like lavender fields, the friendly breeze rustled the grass, and the spaces between the trees looked invitingly warm, but Wirt seemed not to care for the view. His focus was still exclusively on Autumn while she popped about in the meadowgrass. Curiously, Greg watched his brother's profile on the slope of the hill, a long lanky figure gazing out after the little silhouette that stood as a tiny mockup of his own from so many years ago. Greg wondered if he really thought he'd designed the costume in order to make fun of him. He hoped not, because he hadn't.

"You alright?" he asked.

Wirt said, "Yeah," but he didn't look it. His brow was furrowed and he seemed anxious. "Can't remember the last time I came back here." Greg himself hadn't since the summer before high school. It really was funny that you could forget so much about the places that were important to you when you were young.

A few yards away, Autumn squatted down low to pick something up, and came pattering back to her father as quickly as she could. "Ock," she said, and deposited what looked like a stone in his lap. When she let go, it quaked and started to move. Greg sat up as a wrinkly little head came into view, and the brothers saw that it was not a rock but a tiny dark turtle. Wirt hastily lifted the reptile with two reluctant fingers and a wary eye.

"Isn't it the wrong time of year for turtles?" he asked as Greg took it from him and placed it in the palm of his hand. It stared up at him with shiny, tired eyes.

Greg thought about it for a minute. "It was the wrong time of year for frogs too, once," he said. "I guess everything must have its season."

Wirt didn't look reassured. "Well, get it out of here," he said, pulling Autumn close as she tried to grab at it. "I don't like the way it's looking at her."

"Hmm." Greg sat back, eyeing the little critter. It pulled its head halfway inside its shell and seemed content to lie. "Doesn't seem so bad to me," he said, stroking its cold back. "Maybe you could let her keep it."

Wirt's eyebrows almost touched his hairline. "Are you crazy?" he asked. "One-year-olds can't have pets. Definitely not ones like that."

"Well, I could keep it on retainer until she's old enough." As he stroked the turtle, its eyes closed and it seemed almost to smile. "It's been a long time since I had an ectothermic amigo around."

"Don't keep it, Greg," Wirt said.

"But it's so cute and harmless," Greg said. When he tilted his hand, light glinted as if in oil slicks off of its shiny black back. "And it's gonna die out here when the weather turns, Wirt. Have a heart."

"I don't like turtles," Wirt said very firmly, and Autumn started tugging on the end of his scarf, tightening it around his neck. "You know why." His eyes skipped briefly to the naked trees around the lake.

Greg did know why, but he said, "It's nothing to be scared of."

"I'm not scared," Wirt said. He wouldn't look at his brother. "I just don't need things reminding me of that anymore."

"Aw, why not?" Greg asked. He held the turtle out in his hand and watched Wirt shrink away from it. "What's wrong with reminding? Don't tell me you grew up and don't believe in fairy tales now." He said it like a joke, but it wasn't, not entirely.

"I'm not in the mood, Greg," Wirt said with a warning tone. "It's just… not the time. No monsters, and no witches, and no turtles. Not now."

"And no gravestones?" Greg asked pointedly, placing the turtle on his knee and wiggling a finger under its chin. He was prodding more than he ought to, but it was the only fair reaction when his brother started acting this weird. "No Beatrice?"

Wirt's frown deepened. "That's different," he snipped.

"It's not," Greg snipped back. "It's all part of the same –"

"It's _not,"_ said Wirt, and he started to raise his voice but stopped when Autumn turned her face up with a worried little look. He raised a hand to dismiss him. "Look, I said I'm not in the mood. Drop it, alright?"

Greg was incredulous. "Drop it?" he asked, placing a palm over the turtle's cold shell. "Seriously? What's up with you? Since when is this something you don't talk to me about?"

"I said forget about it!"

"No!" Greg cried. Wirt had never refused to acknowledge their night in the woods like this before, and it hurt like a punch. He was Greg's last tether to memories of people and places that had weathered through time to nothing more than impressions in sand, and he _knew_ that. "Why won't you talk about it? Why wouldn't you say hi to Beatrice?"

"Greg -"

"Where did this even come from? You don't care? I mean, did - did you get a mortgage and suddenly decide that the stuff that happened when we were kids isn't good enough for you anymo—?"

But Wirt shouted, "You don't know what you're talking about!" a flush rising in his cheeks, and Greg was stopped short. Autumn looked shocked. "You know, you always act like it was all just a big game, back then, and I know you had the time of your life playing with frogs and chasing butterflies and all that, but _I _had to take it seriously. We almost died, Greg. You haven't managed to forget that part yet, have you?" Greg felt stung, and for a second Wirt's scowl faltered as he realized what he'd said, but it reinstated itself stubbornly. "We almost died –_ you_ almost died! – and it would have been my fault. I don't… do you have any idea how close I was to deciding it was better we should just curl up and go to sleep forever?"

His hands clenched briefly and then relaxed again. He took a deep breath. Greg watched with raised brows.

"I – I wasn't really a good person back then, and it was easier to come to terms with that when I was younger but now I just – I don't need anything in my life that reminds me of how selfish I can be. Or how easy it was for me to give up on everything." Unconsciously, Wirt's arm wrapped around his daughter's body while she stuffed his scarf in her mouth. His eyes were on the woods, but they looked a thousand miles away. "There was good stuff in there that I don't want to forget. Friends and – you know, adventure, I guess. But I don't think I can deal with the good things if they come hand-in-hand with remembering how weak I am, too.

"So please," he said wearily, and never once did his gaze leave the brown dead trees: "Just get rid of the turtle."

The breeze ran a hand over the grass around them, and for a few minutes neither brother spoke. Greg let his eyes rest on the shimmering green water below them, which looked soft and calm, though he knew from experience just how shockingly cold it got.

"Da?" Autumn asked from her father's lap. She had disengaged his scarf from his neck completely and pulled it down on top of herself. "Da-da?" He put a hand on her arm, but still didn't look down.

"I'm sorry," Greg said haltingly. "I didn't realize it..."

Wirt bowed his head and finally closed his eyes. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Just forget about it."

"No," Greg insisted, making a gesture toward his brother which Autumn intercepted in order to take his fingers for examination. "I can't sit here and let you think that kind of thing about yourself. It's not true." Wirt's expression knotted up. "You know, you're right when you say there's a lot of stuff I don't remember, but there're things I'll never forget, either. Like the taste of plain mashed potatoes. Or the colors in the big white eyes." They were blue, pink, and yellow_._ "And definitely not making a really stupid decision, as a really little kid, and almost getting myself killed, but in the end things were okay because there was someone there to pick me up and carry me back home again." He stared Wirt down for as long as he wouldn't meet his gaze.

"I shouldn't have let that even happen," he said, voice weak.

"Who cares?" Greg said, raising his arms plaintively. "It happened. Nothing's gonna change that. Things coulda been bad, but we pulled through and everything turned out okay. You want me to get mad at you for not being perfect all the time?"

_"I_ do."

"Get over it." He looked down at the little black turtle, still perched on his knee. "It was an experience that you can't forget, so forgive yourself and move on. And while you're at it, I think you oughta keep the turtle. They move nice and slow. As long as you've gotta be reminded of things, this one'll give you plenty of time to remember where you came from, and lots to think about where you wanna go."

Finally, finally, Wirt turned his head to meet Greg's gaze, his mouth a slant pulled up at the corner. "You're the younger one of us," he said, hunching his shoulders. "Isn't it supposed to be my job to hand _you_ hard life truths?"

Greg said, "It would be if you weren't such a big mess of neuroses all the time," but really he was just glad that he was looking at him again.

Wirt seemed to know he couldn't argue that, and his gaze slid toward the reptile in Greg's lap. He sighed, and leaned in to pick it up, bringing it up to eye level in his palm.

"Hey, you little bundle of evil incarnate," he said after a minute. The turtle yawned. "I've got my eye on you."

"See?" Greg said, stroking its little back. "Another reason to keep the turtle. Keeping your enemies close, and all that." He took it again with no protest from Wirt and placed it back on his knee. "Oddball gets to learn how to be responsible for a pet, and how to stare down the embodiment of despair at the same time, all before kindergarten. Win-win." Autumn struggled to her feet and approached cautiously, eyeing the reptile on its own level. It raised its head at her presence, and she stuck out a little finger at it. Wirt tensed, but the turtle let her impact the end of its nose with hardly more than a blink. "See?" Greg said, poking her gently in the belly button. "She's got the hang of it already."

Wirt cracked a small smile and scooped up his daughter in both arms. "Un-na!" Autumn said, and put her hands on her father's face; he held her close, and she cuddled down against his chest, her pointy hat just short enough to fit in the space under his chin.

"You know," Greg said, "giving you reality checks might be my most important job these days, but you really are a good dad." Wirt looked over at him in surprise. "And you're a good brother, too." He reached over to muss his hair. "Seems like as good a day as any to remind you of that."

Wirt's ears turned red, but he was smiling. "Thanks, Greg," he said, patting his hair down. He wrapped his arms back around his knees and looked down again at the little girl curled in the crook of his body. "That means a lot." Greg wanted to tell him he'd had to put in his share of work this last year to make him think so, but that would have been a lie. It was funny, but Greg had never doubted for a minute that he would be good at this, because his older brother had never once failed to find a way to take care someone who needed him, and that was something Greg knew firsthand.

The two young men sat quiet, basking in the warmth that cracked through the blue-gray sky above and washed down over them like a bath. "I'm sorry for what I said," Wirt said after a while. "About what you don't remember."

Greg cast his eyes down the hill. "It's okay," he said. "You weren't wrong. I don't remember much of the hard stuff." After so many years, the only clear memory of the Unknown that he had left at all was that of one rainy night in the woods, standing beneath the black trees, kept dry under an old blue cloak while Wirt held him close, and got wet. "I guess that means you did your job, though," he said. "Taking care of me and all."

His brother smiled at that.

They sat for a while, listening to the grass sing songs for the sun, gazing out over the treetops and mountains, taking in the view from the edge. Greg had the feeling that there was something very present in the air around them, like this autumn could have lasted forever, if they'd wanted it to. All they would have to do would be to take a peek between the trees. He looked down at the turtle on his knee, stationary as a stone, and then at his niece, eyes half-closed, her little nose lit by the sun and her fists curled around handfuls of her father's sweater.

Maybe it had been difficult for Wirt, once upon a time, to choose to bring them out of the woods and keep on living, but Greg knew without an ounce of doubt he'd made the right decision.

"Hey," he asked his brother. "What time is it?"

Wirt looked at his wrist, and saw he wasn't wearing a watch. "I have no idea," he said, sounding sun-drowsed.

"We should probably go."

"You're absolutely right."

"We can't let Mom and Sara set up the whole party themselves, can we?"

"That would be terrible of us." And Wirt took one more second to look out over the lake before standing with a little groan, still holding Autumn close to his chest.

As they climbed the hill back toward the wall, Greg asked, "What do you think we should name her?"

"Her?" Wirt asked. He looked down to see Greg still carrying the turtle in the palm of his hand. "Greg, I don't know. It's a turtle."

"I'll see if I can come up with some names off the top of my head," Greg said. "Let me think. Harriet, Nora, Rita, Skittles. Eleanor, Odette, Deborah, Madeline, Veronica, Winifred. Ling, Fredericka, Penelope, Zsa-Zsa, Celeste…"

"Come on, Greg."

"Lorna - hey, how about that? - Tabitha, Kathleen, Roberta, Opal, Nadine, Ursula, Rosalind…" He held the little turtle up to Autumn's face. "Do you like that name?" he asked her. "Rosalind?"

She said, "Geg."

"We'll keep working on it, then." And one after another, the brothers crossed over the Garden's wall back into the world, while the trees on the hill behind them whispered with the wind, in woody murmurs that sounded a little like bells, and birds, and best wishes for long lost, but oft-remembered friends.

* * *

**Never thought that I'd be one to get so squishy about brothers and babies, but what can I say, this show brings out the squish in me. ಥ-ಥ **

**As always, thanks all for stopping by! This has been great fun. Once again, if you have any thoughts about the story, I adore reading your comments, and I respond to every review no matter how long it's been, so I hope you'll drop a line.**

**This story was quite down-to-earth for me, but if you visit my tumblr you will see that I also make fanart for OTGW, and some of it is really quite ridiculous - intriguingly so, I like to hope. The link's in my profile, so check it out!**


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